


The White Wolf of Wakanda

by aeli_kindara



Series: Bird-Naming [2]
Category: Black Panther (2018), Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Artist Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes Recovering, Bucky Barnes's Metal Arm, Bucky in Wakanda, Canon Compliant, Christmas in Wakanda, Folklore, Found Family, M/M, Nomad Steve, Panic Attacks, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Steve in Syria, Wakandan Politics, White Wolf Bucky, a year in the life
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-08
Updated: 2018-09-11
Packaged: 2019-06-23 20:22:23
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 30,826
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15614277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aeli_kindara/pseuds/aeli_kindara
Summary: The first time Steve visits Wakanda, Bucky plans it obsessively.He picks neutral clothes, the ones Steve will expect, trims his beard and lets Shuri tie back his hair. He studies himself in the mirror for twenty minutes in her bathroom and pulls it back out again, then keeps staring until she yells something exasperated through the door about white boys and their vanity, and he puts himself together and goes down to the plaza and completely freezes when Steve gets out of the plane.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is a complete draft — updates will post regularly as I finish editing. It builds on my short fic [Bird-Naming](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14489367), but if you haven't read that, the only things you really need to know are that Bucky asked Steve to stay away until Shuri completed his deprogramming; that she has; and that she's been helping him manage panic attacks by teaching him the Latin names of birds.
> 
> All possible thanks to Leo, for drawing me bird pictures and inspiring me to keep writing in this universe, and to Cass for her wonderful beta. <3

The first time Steve visits Wakanda, Bucky plans it obsessively. He picks neutral clothes, the ones Steve will expect, trims his beard and lets Shuri tie back his hair. He studies himself in the mirror for twenty minutes in her bathroom and pulls it back out again, then keeps staring until she yells something exasperated through the door about white boys and their vanity, and he puts himself together and goes down to the plaza and completely freezes when Steve gets out of the plane.

He’s clean shaven and fresh-faced, blonde hair combed neatly back from his forehead like his mom used to do for church on Sundays, a nervous smile in his eyes. He says, “Merry Christmas, Buck,” and pulls Bucky into a careful hug.

Bucky blinks. His missing arm feels more lopsided than usual; he feels paradoxically like he doesn’t know what to do with a limb that isn’t there. He can smell gunmetal on the fabric at the crook of Steve’s arm. He hesitates, then briefly spreads his hand across the small of Steve’s back. “It’s Christmas?” he says.

Steve’s smile falters. He steps back, releasing Bucky, and looks over at him at arm’s length, gaze lingering for an instant on the way Bucky’s shirt falls over his left shoulder. He says, “In two days. I figured you —”

Shuri comes to his rescue. She smiles, warmly, and steps in to kiss Steve’s cheek. “Christmas is not in our culture,” she says, and her voice is grounding, he loves the way she enunciates it, the strong pivot on the T, the gentle R. “I apologize, Captain Rogers. I did not think to tell Bucky the date.”

“No, of — of course,” says Steve. “No apology necessary.”

“Merry Christmas,” says Bucky, belatedly. He means it to make the silence less uncomfortable. Somehow, it does the opposite.

“Well, uh,” says Steve, after an interminable pause, fumbling in his bag. “I — got you something. From Syria. It’s where I — well, I thought I’d save it ‘til Christmas, but since you —”

This is awkward, Bucky thinks. It’s horrible and it’s awkward and it never used to be this way between them. They used to fit together like a baseball and a glove — automatic, instinctive. He reaches out his hand and says, “Thank you,” before he looks at the small package Steve puts in his palm.

It’s a box, hexagonal, warm brown wood inlaid with patterns of lighter wood and red and black and white and mother-of-pearl. It rattles slightly as if there’s something inside. Bucky slides his thumb over the seam.

Steve starts forward as if to help him, like he’s only just remembered Bucky has only one hand. But Bucky leans away slightly, instinctively, and uses his thumb to flip open the lid.

The rich aroma of coffee rises to meet him. The box is full of whole beans, dark-roasted, gleaming in the sun. Interspersed among them are something else: small, faded green seed pods, short and plump. Bucky lowers his face to sniff, and finds they have a slightly floral aroma — some kind of exotic spice. He looks back up at Steve.

“It’s — cardamom coffee,” says Steve. The tips of his ears are red. “They drink it a lot in the souks there, really strong in little cups, and I — well, I thought about how you used to bitch about the instant coffee on the front, so —” He shrugs.

Bucky inhales again. He hasn’t had coffee in — years. Decades? He never tried it in Romania, figured he was already high-strung enough without chemical enhancement. They drink tea here, mostly — handfuls of loose leaves boiled with fresh milk and so much sugar it’s almost syrupy — but he’d forgotten about coffee.

Steve says, still pink, “I don’t know if you have a way to grind it.”

Bucky considers. A machine for grinding. Back when he had his arm, he could have crushed the coffee beans to dust in the palm of his hand. Here, at his _banda,_ he’s kept things simple; immaculate. He cooks over a wood fire and bathes in the rainwater he collects in his cistern; in the dry season, he swims in the lake. He’s not sure he wants something with machine parts there, just yet. He’s not sure he wants Steve, with his gunmetal-smelling arm and his hopeful, tender face.

It’s Shuri who steps in again, voice dry. “Yes,” she says, “we can grind coffee beans in Wakanda.” And then, to Bucky, “Oh, don’t look at me like that! We can get you a mortar and pestle if you’re going to be that way about it! Bast, just bash them between two rocks!”

She sounds so outraged that Bucky can’t help his little snort of laughter. And then Steve’s laughing too, and that doesn’t feel like too much of an intrusion into Bucky’s hard-won life. It feels — sort of — all right.

Shuri throws her hands up. “Go on,” she says. “Laugh at me in my own palace. I can have my brother execute you, you know.” And then, stomping away, flung over her shoulder: “Or you can come inside for dinner.”

\---

Dinner is less awkward, and then more awkward again. Bucky feels his shoulders tensing whenever Steve watches him for too long, eyebrows drawn together, like he’s wondering what’s going on inside Bucky’s head.

There’s nothing going on inside Bucky’s head, just a squirming discomfort at the scrutiny. _Nothing to see here, pal,_ he wants to say, or, _Go on, your boyfriend there wants to tell you all about his fancy new claws._

He’s not sure what’s bringing out this vicious streak. He’s never felt at ease around T’Challa, for all that Shuri insists her brother is a marshmallow; it’s not so much that he once wanted to kill Bucky as that he would’ve gone through Steve to do it.

They have no trouble talking to each other, of course. Even though they’ve known each other for all of six months, even though they’ve spent most of their time in the same physical place battling each other with every grim ounce of determination in their bones.

And there’s the problem. Bucky _knows_ Steve, he’d die for Steve; has died for Steve, for all intents and purposes. He — loves Steve. So why does he feel like a cornered animal with him in the room?

He watches Steve. He’s all leaning forward and earnest fucking eyes, soulful goddamn labrador face — suffocatingly correct — and Bucky says, suddenly, “You used to throw snowballs with _rocks_ in them.”

The conversation lurches to an instant, teetering halt.

“You _did,_ ” says Bucky. “Remember that Christmas? With the storm? The whole neighborhood got into it —” he remembers them defending the mountains piled up by the snowplows, kids up all the way up from Riverside trying to make incursions — “and you were throwing _rocks._ ”

Steve turns red, coughs, then coughs harder, choking on his own embarrassment. He thumps his chest and answers, weakly, “Only at people who deserved it.”

Bucky narrows his eyes. “You threw one at me!”

Steve’s face is turning purple. Shuri is watching with undisguised delight. Steve says, looking like he’d almost rather the earth opened up and swallowed him, “You deserved it?”

A beat passes, and another. Then, to the equal surprise of everyone else in the room, it’s T’Challa who bursts out laughing.

It takes him a while to stop. He’s bent double, slapping his knee, overtaken by breathless, unkingly giggles. When he finally recovers enough to wipe his eyes, still wheezing, Shuri just raises her eyebrows and says, “ _Brother,_ ” and he gasps, “Sorry — I’m so sorry.” Then, a dimpled smile tugging his cheeks: “You’re worse than me and Nakia.”

Bucky doesn’t know who Nakia is. He glances a question at Shuri, who throws up her hands and declares, “ _Honestly,_ Bucky, Nakia is his _girlfriend,_ you’ve _got_ to come to the city more often!”

Bucky’s not sure he wants to come to the city more often. But he keeps a straight face and says, “That depends. All that tech of yours good enough to make us a white Christmas? ‘Cause I owe this guy a snowball to the face.”

And it’s easier from there.

They talk about Steve’s work recovering Chitauri weaponry from war zones, and Shuri and Nakia’s new outreach center in Oakland. Steve listens with interest, and starts talking about the New Deal art schools, back in the ‘30s; about America as it used to be, the massive investment in public good. “Not,” he adds, “that it was perfect — I’ll take vaccines and the right to marry who you want any day —” and Bucky, remembers, suddenly, the Klansmen in the news, that girl up in Peekskill, and blinks.

He hasn’t thought much about this side of Steve. Well, he has — it’s every side of Steve, all noble and intent on making a difference — but he hasn’t thought about the Steve who went on for critical hours about WPA murals, who had things to _say_ about American culture and the implications thereof, about the way it’s represented and how that changes the hearts of the people who see it. Steve _believes_ in art, and he’s not just talking at random, here; he’s making a pitch.

“Read about the Harlem Renaissance,” he’s saying. “Read about the WPA school they had up there. They did more than ours ever came close to. When people see themselves represented in art, it _matters._ ”

T’Challa is smiling. He and Steve are similar, Bucky thinks; it takes Steve being here for him to see it. T’Challa’s mask of regal remove is just that — under it, he’s almost as much of a rabble-rouser as Steve.

When the meal is finished and they’ve all had a second glass of wine, T’Challa rises with a meaningful look at Shuri, and yawns a little too widely to be wholly unperformed. “I must visit the Border Tribe tomorrow,” he says. “I will leave you. There is more wine, if you wish it; Sergeant Barnes knows where to find anything else you might require.”

_Bucky,_ thinks Bucky.

Shuri stays seated for another moment. Then, with T’Challa tilting an eyebrow at her, she scowls and rises, leather of her sandal slapping against the tiled floor. “I’ll go too,” she says, raising her eyebrows at her brother, _happy now?_

That leaves just Steve and Bucky, which is what T’Challa intends, of course; he’s giving them time alone together, time to — catch up, but Steve is _looking_ at him again, with that full, warm, grateful attention in his gaze, and abruptly the room is too small. It’s too hot, and his skin is too tight, and he can’t think of any bird names; they’ve all fled from his mind. _I thought I was ready,_ he thinks, the words churning through his panic like muddy water, _I thought I was ready, and I’m not, I’m not, I’m not._

He rises abruptly, and Steve jerks back a little in surprise. “I’ll show you to your room,” Bucky says.

Steve’s eyes are hurt, but he doesn’t object, just rises to follow. And moving is easier; it gives Bucky a sense of purpose, a set of tasks to execute, a beat of footsteps to calm his rising heartbeat.

“Shuri said you should get to the city more often,” says Steve, his voice deliberately light. “Do you live somewhere else?”

It’s strange to think he _lives_ here, though he guesses it’s true. It’s strange to realize T’Challa hasn’t been passing every scrap of information about his life on to Steve. “I have a place in the hills,” he says. “South of here.” He stops at the door of the rooms that have been prepared for Steve. “This is you.”

Steve pauses for a moment with his hand on the doorknob. His eyes are earnest, liquid. Then he drops his hand to his side and takes a step away from the door. “Buck —”

Bucky steps back sharply, and Steve freezes. He’s battling to keep the devastation off his face.

_God,_ Bucky thinks to himself, savagely. _What kind of asshole are you?_ He shouldn’t have invited Steve here; shouldn’t have put him through this. Or he should be able to get the fuck over himself and just — just —

“It’s hard.” He doesn’t mean to say it out loud.

Steve swallows. His voice comes out wet and strained, like he’s got a cold. Used to have colds all the time, Steve. “If you want me to, I’ll go.”

Bucky’s breath catches. Steve is staying for four days; that’s the plan, that’s what he’s been readying himself for. Four days of this exposure; four days of navigating these treacherous waters. It could be cut short. The end could be in sight.

What after that, though? What’s the play — hide forever? Never see Steve again?

It feels like the bravest thing he’s ever done. He half hates himself for doing it. He more than half wants to run out into the night, not stop running until he’s deep in the woods, somewhere Steve will never find him.

Four days. He can do four days.

He says, “Don’t go.”

\---

But the next two days are awful.

They’re stilted and awkward and oppressively well-meaning, and Bucky’s panic never fully abates, not even when he’s asleep; he wakes up feeling like he’s just sprinted through all the streets of Bucharest, again and again, and there’s an aching in his phantom arm. Sitting in rooms with Steve makes him feel like his chest will never expand again, but going somewhere else seems like it would be worse, because in the palace at least he can make more and more frequent breaks for the bathroom, spend them hugging his knees on the floor and grasping for something to keep his mind from spinning apart.

It’s not fair that this should happen now. When he’s finally stable, finally himself; he’s supposed to be _better_ than this now.

The worst part is, he can see it wearing on Steve. He can see the wounded shriveling-in-on-himself Steve does every time Bucky shies away from his touch; can see the miserable tension he wears under his brave face. And it’s Bucky’s fault, _Bucky’s goddamn fault._

He spends one trip to the bathroom punching his thigh. Over and over again, just above the knee. The waves of aching pain grow as the bruise does, and he grits teeth and pounds away harder, methodically, beating the pain into himself like a trophy, like a sign: _This is Bucky Barnes, who broke his best friend’s heart._

The muscle of his thigh is numb when he returns to breakfast, but he doesn’t limp. It’s a good thing he doesn’t have his metal arm anymore. He might be down another limb.

Shuri looks up at him, and her gaze is sharp, like she can see the self-loathing behind his leaden eyes. She says, “Bucky. We’re going to the mountains.”

Bucky blinks. “What?”

It’s T’Challa who answers. “M’Baku of the Jabari Tribe is interested in resuming formal relations with the rest of Wakanda. Preparations for a state visit are in progress, but he is curious about Captain Rogers; even the Jabari have heard of his return from the ice. You are not representatives of my government; you can make a social visit, and Shuri with you. I will send Okoye as her personal bodyguard.”

Bucky blinks, processing. T’Challa adds, “Besides, we wanted to give you a white Christmas,” and it startles him almost into a laugh.

Motion; a mission. Something to _do_ other than sit and let Steve’s stare break him down into his molecular components. Bucky feels a rush of gratitude so great it almost chokes him. His leg throbs.

“There are new birds in the mountains,” says Shuri. “Ones you haven’t seen yet.”

Bucky says, “When do we leave?”

\---

The geography of Wakanda is not like that of Europe. Its mountains are no Alps, or Urals; they rise at random, massive extinct volcanic cones. Some, like the one near Bucky’s home, are hollow at the center, crater walls ringing acacia-studded plains. Others, like the Jabari Tribe’s, tower into the clouds.

Bucky knows it well, from a distance. It straddles the rift escarpment, and the glaciers at its peak are white smudges high in the blue sky, sailing above all but the wispiest clouds. On days when it snows, those white smudges run like a dripping ice cream cone, fingers of snow stretching down the mountain’s flanks. During the wet season, it snows a lot.

They take a jet halfway up the mountain, Okoye sitting cross-legged at the controls. Bucky’s met her before, a few times; he always feels a little in awe of the red-clad Dora Milaje. They make him think of Peggy Carter. Fearless; implacably devoted to their mission.

Steve and Okoye chat in low voices as they fly. _Peggy Carter indeed,_ Bucky notes, and tries not to think it with a snarl. He fades out of earshot to watch the landscape pass under the jet’s rear window instead.

The great waterfall funnels through the point where Jabari Mountain’s flank meets the rift wall. Right now, it’s thundering, spray flying up to spatter the glass even at their altitude; a great white flume, swollen by the December rains and melting mountain snow. It churns through layer upon layer of ancient rock, driving like a drill into the earth; twists and winds around the towering cliffs, past the forested flanks of the mountain’s lowest reaches, and plunges finally into the plains. Somewhere that way, there are other countries, Bucky knows, but only a few nomads travel the desert between.

They pass over the falls, and start climbing, the jet’s belly nearly brushing the treetops. There are gorillas somewhere in this forest, Bucky knows, and he has a sudden, visceral memory of taking Steve to see the gorilla at the circus, Madison Square Garden, 1938. From a fig tree, a colobus monkey chatters at their passing, whipping its long, black-and-white tail.

They touch down on a wide rock ledge, perched, it seems, on the very edge of the world. The talus slope below them drops precipitously into the forest. Bucky can hear unfamiliar bird calls, but he sees nothing, until Shuri suddenly grabs him by the arm and points to the sky and says, “Lammergeier!”

It’s soaring above them, teetering on the wind, tawny belly and dark wings. “ _Gypaetus barbatus,_ ” Shuri adds. “Bearded vulture, they call it also — it nests at M’Baku’s palace, high in the peaks.”

_Gypaetus barbatus._ Bucky mouths the words. Steve is watching them, a puzzled line between his eyebrows, but he doesn’t ask.

It’s colder, up here, and Shuri gives them each a thick cloak. Bucky wraps it around himself gratefully; he’s been dressing in the western style, with Steve around, rather than his habitual colorful wraps. He wonders if he should abandon the pretense. The weight of the cloth on his shoulders is reassuring, grounding. He wraps it tighter and shivers, not with cold, but relief.

Shuri is the only one of them who has been here before. She didn’t come by jet, then, either; it staggers Bucky to imagine the long, desperate uphill toil. Now, though, Shuri is grinning as she takes the lead, Okoye shadowing close behind her. They make a turn, then another, and there’s the first snowbank, lingering in the shadow of a cliff. Shuri lets out a delighted yell and pounces, seizing a handful of snow and pivoting to hurl it at Bucky.

It hits him full in the face. He blinks. Snow drips off his eyelashes. Everyone is still, waiting for him to react.

A great gob of snow slides off his cloak and into his waiting hand. He grins, and launches himself at Shuri.

She yelps, turning to flee, and he catches enough of her cloak to shove his handful of snow down the back of her neck. She swears loudly and doubles over, clawing it out of the fabric, shrieking, “Just you wait, _Sergeant Barnes,_ I’ll get you —”

“That so?” says Bucky. He grabs his own handful of snow. It’s hard to make a good ball with only one hand; he rolls it a little clumsily. As Shuri straightens, he times his toss perfectly, underhand, innocent. The snowball explodes in her face.

Shuri gapes at him, dripping, then bursts into laughter.

“Okoye,” she gasps through it, “Okoye, defend me from the — ahaha — the fearsome Winter Soldier — the White Wolf of Wakanda —” She wheezes for air, staggering behind, Okoye, who’s got a smile tugging at her usually stern face even as she moves automatically to place her body between Shuri and the icy threat.

Bucky feels a tap at his side. When he turns, Steve is holding out a big, round, perfectly formed snowball.

He takes it slowly. Okoye’s eyes widen; Shuri’s gripping the back of her cloak, still shrieking with laughter, levering her like a human shield. She says, “Don’t you —”

Steve raises an eyebrow at Bucky. _You gonna let these girls boss you around?_

And Bucky grins, winds up, and lets fly.

The snowball explodes spectacularly across Okoye’s breastplate, white snow on red beads.

For a moment, she only blinks. Then she says, “Oh, it’s _on._ ”

Shuri shrieks again as Okoye twists and grabs her shoulder, and then they’re running, sprinting up the trail for the next, larger snowbank. No sooner are they there than a snowball’s flying back at Bucky, courtesy of Okoye, and damn, has she got an _arm._

He hears laughter as he staggers backward and is startled to realize it’s his own. But Steve’s elbowing him, yelling, “Get the high ground!” and so he does, scrambling up the cliff face to a spot where he can take cover half behind a rock promontory, and he glances down at Steve and Steve tosses up another snowball, underhand. Bucky catches it and, in a single, fluid motion, reels upright and winds back and hurls it at the girls.

He drops before he can see the hit, but Okoye yells and Steve whoops. A snowball explodes harmlessly against the rock beside Bucky’s head. Below him, Steve’s ready with another.

They’re as good a team as they always were. Bucky the marksman, Steve shouting out reconnaissance and ducking back into the safety of the trail where it bends, keeping up a steady supply of ammo.

“They’re building defensive fortifications,” he reports. “I can’t see what they’re doing behind them —”

Bucky hazards a glance long enough to get the lay of the land. A snowball hits him full in the face: Okoye, popping up from behind a makeshift icy battlement of rocks and snow. Shuri is nowhere to be seen.

“Keep ‘em coming,” he calls to Steve. He explodes the next snowball into powder against the cliff wall above their heads, and hears Shuri’s yelp of laughter as it showers down on her head.

A lull follows. When Bucky dares a glance around the rock, he can’t see anything behind the wall. He tries a few gentle lobs to arc over it and down behind, like throwing grenades into trenches, but hears no response, not even a spray of snow as they hit something solid.

He’s beginning to feel uneasy when he he hears a full-throated battle cry. He spins to look and sees Okoye, standing full out of her trench, a snowball in each fist.

He jerks back just in time to avoid another full-frontal hit. And then there are snowballs detonating all around him, a machine-gun fire, showering him with powder even as he crouches in his shelter. And they just keep coming — and coming — and it’s an impressive display, yes, they must have been stockpiling, but why? Bucky can just stay sheltered until they run out again, and then —

It’s a diversion.

He realizes it a split second before he hears the shrill battle cry from below him. He twists to see Shuri hurling herself at Steve, feline; she tackles him into the snow, and for a moment, her moves remind Bucky indelibly of her brother. She grinds snow into Steve’s hair and he twists away, laughing uproariously, but he isn’t struggling hard. Then Okoye’s rounding the corner, a snowball in her fist. She glances up at Bucky in warning.

He raises his hand, palm out to show he’s unarmed. “Relax,” he says. “I surrender.”

Okoye looks skeptical. Bucky shrugs. Steve’s spluttering, red-faced, and he’s rallying; Bucky knows the move he’ll use to flip Shuri into the snow. And he’s stayed nice and dry this whole time. He threw a rock at Bucky once, the fucker.

“On second thought,” he says, “I defect,” and clambers down and goes to sit on Steve’s legs.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've based Wakanda's physical geography primarily on that of the Ngorongoro Highlands of northern Tanzania, and Jabariland on Mt. Kenya in (you guessed it!) Kenya. Both are located in real life along the Eastern Rift Valley, where faulting and thinning of the continental crust has resulted both in the rift escarpment itself, which sets the more arid valley to the east off from the cooler, wetter highlands to the west, and in increased volcanism, which builds hills and mountains. Throwing a vibranium meteorite into the mix would undoubtedly have triggered particularly intense faulting and volcanic activity. Geothermal activity and hot springs would be expected in this environment as well.
> 
> (Yes, you have a pedantic geologist writing your fic for you. Deal with it.)
> 
> The gorilla Steve and Bucky would have seen in 1938 was [Gargantua](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gargantua_\(gorilla\)), also known as Buddy, the star of the Ringling Brothers circus in the late 30s and 40s. His story is a pretty awful one; he was captured as an infant in the Belgian Congo and lived through some horrible traumas, including being attacked with nitric acid while living as a pet on a ship. He wound up living in Brooklyn for several years with [Gertrude Lintz](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gertrude_Lintz), a dog breeder and exotic animal enthusiast, who dressed him in human clothes and drove him around town in her car; after he frightened her by breaking out of his cage to seek comfort during a thunderstorm, she sold him to Ringling Bros. The whole attacked-with-acid thing left him with a menacing-looking scar and some aggressive behaviors, and he was billed by the circus as the "the most ferocious, most terrifying and most dangerous of all living creatures." He was kept in a plate glass, climate-controlled box and paraded around the ring on a wagon drawn by six white horses. He died of pneumonia in 1949.
> 
> (I'm not saying this gorilla's life story has some upsetting parallels with that of Bucky Barnes. Nope that's all you. I'm just over here weeping quietly in a corner.)


	2. Chapter 2

By the time they brush the powder from their clothes and gather up their things, they’re all red-faced and laughing, damp from melted snow. Shuri shoulders her bag and leads the way around the next turn in the path, out onto a wide ledge — and face-to-face with nine solemn-faced guards.

They’re men and women both, wearing patchy brown-and-white furs, and they stand with their arms crossed, stances wide. Bucky reaches uneasily for a weapon he doesn’t have.

“General N’Koma,” says Shuri. “Have you been here the whole time?”

The man at the center of the line steps forward. He’s massive. Bucky feels Steve tense beside him.

But the general just bows his head in greeting. “We were sent to offer you escort to the palace.”

Shuri raises her eyebrows. “And?”

There’s a slight smirk playing around N’Koma’s mouth when he straightens. “And you seemed to be having fun.”

\---

The Jabari palace is built into a mountainside. Under the cover of snow and gathering darkness, its lamplit passages gleam like curving wooden ribs jutting from the rocky slope. High above them, a great carved gorilla leans into thin air, like the figurehead at the prow of a ship. On its upraised arms, it bears a long wing of the palace itself.

Bucky can smell wood shavings on the air. As they enter one of the curving halls, he eyes the beams over their heads. No sign of metal to hold things together, just wood, lovingly crafted, and he’s assaulted by a sudden sense memory: sawdust clinging to small hands, grownup voices high above him, the smell of leather and freshly cut pine — his grandfather’s carpentry shop. He couldn’t have been older than four when it closed down, but he remembers — he _remembers_ begging his mother to go play there, remembers her fretting over the loose tools, remembers the horse, his grandfather delivering orders by goddamn horse and cart.

What a strange, stupid thing to have in his brain. He can barely piece himself together half the time — can barely trace the throughline that goes from Steve and Brooklyn to mud and pain and rifle sights to cold to murder, seven decades of murder, and back to Steve. He can scarcely hold _that_ in himself, arrange all the parts as a whole. How can he hold the view from the shop floor of a man who died before Bucky’s life even really began?

The guards don’t take them to the vast open wing that juts out over the gorge; that’s where the throne room is, Shuri tells them in an undertone. They lead them instead to an interior room, paneled in blonde planks with a fire dancing in the hearth, long table set with a dozen places or more, and the biggest man Bucky has ever seen pushing back his chair and raising his arms in welcome.

“Ladies,” says General N’Koma. “Sirs. M’Baku, leader of the Jabari Tribe.”

M’Baku is grinning. “Little brat!” he thunders, and Shuri steps up, smiling back, and punches him in the chest. “Big brat,” she shoots back, and M’Baku picks her up bodily in a great bear hug, letting her squeal and kick her feet for a moment before he sets her back down.

Okoye’s grip twists slightly on her spear. Her face is hard. M’Baku eyes her with a wolfish grin and asks, “Do I worry you, Milaje?”

“You may call me General Okoye,” says Okoye, unsmiling. “And no.”

M’Baku throws back his head in laughter. When he straightens, he turns to Bucky and Steve.

Excited to meet Captain America; that’s what T’Challa said. So Bucky’s already fading back half a step, already letting the shadows swallow his face, when M’Baku engulfs his one hand with both of his, bows his head, and says, “White Wolf. It is an honor.”

Bucky stills in surprise. He blinks, once. “Likewise,” he manages.

M’Baku moves on to Steve. The twinkle is back in his eyes. “Captain Rogers,” he says gravely.

“Steve,” says Steve, swinging his arm out solemnly to grasp M’Baku’s outstretched hand. It’s a caricature of earnestness so profound that for a moment Bucky’s whole body is back at that recruiting center, that very first one, tiny little Steve with his shirt off and his hollowed out chest and a handshake that’s bigger than he is; a stare that challenges you to point out he’s next to nothing, a dandelion, a shrimp. And he _does_ look small, next to M’Baku, or at least normal-sized. Bucky doesn’t think anyone’s made Steve look _small_ in something like seventy-five years.

“Steve,” M’Baku echoes. He turns to the rest of the room. The guards have remained; several are looking longingly at the spread of food. “What are you waiting for? Let’s eat!”

The spread is rich and unfamiliar, different from the Wakandan fare to which Bucky’s grown accustomed. There are steaming bowls of curry and lentil soup, platters of buttery-tasting flatbread and salads with vegetables and fruit he hasn’t seen before. The Jabari pass around bowls of crumbled goat cheese, which they spoon over everything. Bucky adds a generous dollop to his soup and tries a bite; it’s salty and rich with unfamiliar spices. It warms him down to his core. He hadn’t even realized he was chilled from the snowball fight.

Best of all, though, there is coffee.

Steve’s little box is still sitting untouched at the table in Bucky’s rooms. He never stays in the city; he doesn’t know his way around his kitchen. He’s still not sure if Wakandans drink coffee, and if they do, how they make it. He’s never seen it, anyway.

He lifts his cup to his nose. The smell is rich, dark — perfect. He maybe shouldn’t drink it. He’s tightly wound enough already. But while he may be dysfunctional, at least he’s no longer a bomb primed to go off; at least he doesn’t have metal fingers itching for the feel of somebody’s throat.

He closes his eyes and inhales once, twice, slowly. Then he lifts the cup to his lips.

It’s as good as he remembered. It’s better than he remembered. He can’t help a small noise escaping his chest. He opens his eyes quickly, but no one’s looking at him, no one but Steve — who only gives him a tiny, fond smile, conspiratorial, and looks away again.

Across the table, Okoye is almost as absorbed in her coffee as Bucky feels. He takes another sip, shuddering at the pleasure of it, and Okoye catches his eye and shakes her head and says, “Bast, I missed this stuff.”

Bucky considers this. Steve is quiet at his side, listening, head tilted toward them, but Bucky waits, and he doesn’t ask. So Bucky swallows his third sip — still perfect — and says, “Why?”

He means, _Why don’t you have coffee all the time._ He means, _Is there no coffee in Wakanda?_ Though of course they’re in Wakanda, if nothing like the Wakanda he’s familiar with, and these are simply too many words for his tongue to find.

Okoye opens her mouth to answer. But it’s Shuri who says, over the clatter of conversation, “Oh _God,_ it’s the _stupidest_ thing!”

The room falls quiet, all attention suddenly on her. If she feels self-conscious, she doesn’t show it. She merely continues, scornfully, “It’s _politics._ When the colonizers came to our continent, some stupid dusty elders decided that we should resist — not by actually _helping_ our neighbors, _Bast_ no, but _symbolically._ By refusing to buy their products. Though they were fine with tea — don’t ask me what backward logic that is.”

“It’s seen as unpatriotic,” Okoye supplies, more diplomatically. “Coffee was from our own continent, and appropriated by the colonizers as a tool of oppression. It’s a little old-fashioned, and you can certainly buy it in the markets — plenty of people do. But the ruling family generally abstain.”

“And so does Okoye,” says Shuri, “because she’s got a stick up her —”

“ _Enough,_ ” says Okoye.

M’Baku’s smiling, leaning back expansively in his chair. “And that is why we sensible Wakandans like to stay up here. Away from all the crazy.”

Shuri swats him lightly. “Don’t get a big head. You’re even more isolationist than we are.”

M’Baku’s smile grows. He glances at N’Koma, at his right, also smiling. Then he yawns, widely; Bucky can see all the way to his last, blindingly white molars. When he finishes, he leans forward and looks around the circle, eyes dancing, and says, “Actually, we’ve been trading with our eastern neighbors for the last two hundred years.”

\---

That’s how the Great Wakandan Trade Negotiations of 2017 get their start. Or so Bucky supposes, anyway.

It’s not hard to fill in the blanks. Cut off from their own countrymen, the Jabari began to cautiously engage with the nomadic tribes that travel the arid savanna on their other border. In the nineteenth century, they established themselves as a distant link on the global economic chain. They bought coffee, and Indian spices, and exotic types of wood to panel the palace — M’Baku’s great-grandfather was particularly zealous in this pursuit — and began to grow their own crops, too, on the mountain’s lower slopes. Beans and maize and coffee, lots of coffee, and now M’Baku wants to rejoin the greater Wakandan political landscape, and he wants a trade agreement in return.

If it means more coffee, Bucky’s all for it.

Shuri rolls her eyes and exclaims a lot, but she’s actually pretty good at this shit: teasing out the details of what M’Baku has and what he wants, things like military assistance and contribution to international economic aid and whether they’re on the table; Jabari Mountain’s geothermal energy resources, technological development, transportation. She covers it all lightly, with humor, and at the end she offers a sweet smile and tilts her head and says, “I’ll mention your interest to my brother,” and the serious portion of the evening is over.

A cheer rises from M’Baku’s warriors when he rolls out the keg of banana beer. Shuri glances at Okoye hopefully; Okoye rolls her eyes to the heavens and says, “You are _seventeen,_ ” and Shuri pouts but slumps back into her seat.

“White Wolf,” says M’Baku, carrying two brimming mugs around the table. “Steve. Will you partake in a time-honored tradition of our culture?”

“You can call me Bucky,” says Bucky, taking the mug.

“But you are White Wolf,” says M’Baku, and claps a hand on his metal shoulder as he turns away.

If this is a tradition of Jabari culture, it’s hardly one the Howling Commandos wouldn’t recognize, or the polyglot dockworkers of 1930s Red Hook, or hell, the Russian soldiers that ran Bucky for all those decades in Siberia. It’s a pretty simple one: raise your glass with a manly sort of roar, and pour it down your throat as fast as you reasonably can — or maybe unreasonably, if it comes to that.

The banana beer is sweet and strong and tangy, with a little bit of a dusty aftertaste. Bucky coughs slightly on the last swallow, and looks over at Steve, who’s wiping his mouth with the back of his hand; he’s slopped a little beer across his cheek. He smiles at Bucky, a secret, happy sort of smile, and Bucky doesn’t really mean to, but he smiles back.

Steve’s smile doesn’t grow — not exactly. It’s more that the warmth of it suddenly overflows into his eyes, glowing and forgiving and so happy that Bucky can’t look away. Every atom of Steve’s body is love.

“Another!” roars M’Baku, and the spell is broken. Bucky proffers his mug; he knows that the smile has slipped from his face. He’s still holding it, though, somewhere inside his chest. He thinks that he might be able, sometime, to call it up again.

By the third round, M’Baku’s challenging Steve to arm wrestle; by the fourth, Okoye is bullying Shuri off to bed and the rest of them are clattering down the stairs to M’Baku’s personal sparring gym, Steve grinning over his victory and M’Baku proclaiming, “Supersoldier, yeah? I do not know about ‘supersoldier.’ Always following orders. Here in Jabariland, we call men _warriors,_ not soldiers!”

“I’ve never been too good at following orders,” Steve answers lightly. “You’ll notice I don’t go by Captain anymore.”

M’Baku’s sparring gym is large and low-ceilinged, lit by torches in sconces on the walls. It’s open on one side to the night air, only wood pillars separating them from the precipitous drop. Through them, Bucky can see the carved gorilla’s back, and the stars beyond; the breeze has an icy bite to it. Inside, though, the room is warm, and at its center is a wide, shallow pool, steam rising from its surface to shimmer in the air.

“In Wakanda,” says M’Baku, “we fight in water.”

“Fine by me,” says Steve, and Bucky thinks of all the times they’ve knocked each other into rivers, and nearly laughs.

They strip out of shirts and shoes and don their protective padding — and that makes Bucky settle a little more easily onto the bench against the wall to watch. M’Baku hands his beer to N’Koma, who holds out a hand for Steve’s as well, but Steve’s gaze travels past him to find Bucky, leaning back in the shadows, and he grins and comes over to set down his mug on the bench by Bucky’s knee.

His loss. Bucky’s nearly done with his own. He drains it, then switches to drinking Steve’s.

M’Baku’s good; Bucky will give him that. Within thirty seconds, though, Bucky’s let go of the last of his tension, because Steve’s just toying with him.

Oh, he’s fighting honorably enough. Completely by the book, polite jabs and blocks, but he’s barely breaking a sweat, and M’Baku’s hurling everything he has at him, roundhouse punches and crushing grapples that Steve breaks effortlessly with a twist of his arms. He could take down M’Baku anytime he pleases. He knows it.

M’Baku’s realizing it too. His next punch is a feint. And then he’s bending low, splashing water up into Steve’s eyes, sweeping a kick out to knock his legs from under him, and grabbing Steve’s hair as he goes to wrench him down.

The surrounding guards exclaim. Bucky nearly laughs. M’Baku’s just invited Steve to fight dirty.

Steve’s not a soldier, see. Not really. He’s not a boxer, either; Bucky taught him a few easy patterns, but that’s not Steve. He never went through basic; never did a single thing by the book in his life. He’s polite enough to pretend, most of the time, but it’s only a show. Under it — Steve’s a fucking wildcat.

It’s over before anyone but Bucky knows what’s happened. One moment, Steve’s hitting the water with an enormous splash; the next, there’s a yelp from M’Baku and it’s his head underwater, his neck with Steve’s elbow bearing down on it, his enormous hand tapping once, twice, three times on Steve’s calf. And Steve’s scrambling and standing, hair dripping in his face, and he says benignly, “Good match,” like the all-American motherfucker he is.

And maybe it’s that Bucky’s on his fourth — no, fifth — beer. Maybe it’s that he’s kind of fucking in love with Steve and that’s easier, somehow, with a pleasantly buzzing head and a room full of drunken strangers. Maybe it’s that he’s pretty sure he still knows how to smile, or maybe it’s just his goddamn pride, but whatever it is, he lifts his chin and calls out, from the shadows at the back of the room, “And that’s why you don’t mess around with fucking _Brooklyn!_ ”

A half dozen faces pivot to look at him. Steve’s, delighted, incredulous; the others — well, Bucky’s not looking at the others, is he, he’s only got fucking eyes for fucking Steve.

He lifts the mug — a silent toast. For a moment, no one speaks, and then there’s a rousing cry, and calls for a fresh keg, and more drinks are poured, there’s more laughing and more shouting, and M’Baku’s wading out of the pool and calling out, “Care to go a round then, Brooklyn?”

He gets close enough to drip on Bucky, nearly. It might be intimidating, except that it’s not. Bucky doesn’t rise. He says, “Looks like I forgot to bring my arm.”

“I will tie one behind my back,” says M’Baku, grinning toothily. “We have honor here in Jabariland.”

“Another time,” says Bucky. He points with his beer mug at Steve, making his way over through shoulder slaps and playful punches. “He’s defending my honor tonight.”

Steve’s close enough to hear, and he chokes a little on a startled laugh. So is N’Koma, who raises his drink and shouts, “Then I must challenge for the White Wolf’s honor! What say you, Steve Rogers?”

Steve looks briefly taken aback. Then he turns, grins, and says, “Bring it on.”

Bucky shrugs philosophically, and goes to get another beer.

\---

In the end, Steve fights every one of M’Baku’s personal guard — N’Koma twice — and then several of them at once, until M’Baku at last cries out, “Enough, enough! I am getting weary.”

Bucky doesn’t know how late it is. The stars are glittering cold on the snowfields outside; the chill of the wind off the mountain slopes is stronger than before. But apparently M’Baku’s weariness does not mean it’s time to sleep, merely to adjourn to another room, strewn with couches, and to switch to a warm, strong drink that Bucky can’t identify. It goes down smooth. The air is smoky, and there’s a tray of joints being passed around; he takes whatever it is without asking, lets the guardswoman light it up and sucks it down like he used to smoke cigarettes in wartime, hungry, and imagines he feels the chemical fizzing in his veins.

He smokes it fast, to a stub, tilts his head back and lets the conversation flow over him. Craning far enough, he can see a sliver of a moon, rising over the mountain ridge’s craggy silhouette.

The angle sends all the blood to his head. When he sits up to reorient himself, and finds that it’s only him and Steve and M’Baku. All the others have faded away to bed.

“I am glad,” says M’Baku, breathing out smoke through his nostrils — he’s still got a joint. So does Steve, which is kind of hilarious; Steve doesn’t get drunk, doesn’t get high. Constitutionally incapable. Bucky’s happy not to have that problem.

“I am glad,” says M’Baku again, lazily, watching the smoke spiral, “you are not our enemy. You are a formidable opponent, my friend.”

“Likewise,” says Steve, and Bucky wants to pull his voice over himself like a blanket. Just — wrap it around himself and float in that, forever. He thinks that would be nice.

God. He _is_ fucking high.

“You should grow a beard, though,” says M’Baku, “so people will believe you are a real man,” and then, “has anyone ever bested you in single combat?” and Bucky instinctively tenses, because —

Him. He has.

Steve doesn’t say that, though. He doesn’t answer at all, actually, just says, “A beard, huh? Maybe I will,” and that satisfies M’Baku, apparently, or maybe he’s already forgotten what he asked.

Bucky has a question of his own. It’s been lurking within him, maybe all night, all year; it rises up so suddenly now that he almost looks around to see who else has spoken. “Why do you call me White Wolf?”

M’Baku doesn’t startle, though. He just stares meditatively at the ceiling. “Because that is what you are called.”

Bucky makes a frustrated sound in his throat. Steve’s head pivots to look at him, eyes sober; M’Baku just keeps gazing dreamily up at the swirls over their heads. He says, unhurried, “There is a story.”

He closes his eyes. Bucky waits; his gaze brushes into Steve’s, and Steve raises an eyebrow. _Think he’s fallen asleep?_

He hasn’t, though. “Wolf was the first animal put on earth,” says M’Baku, his voice a low rumble, cadence hypnotic. “And the wisest. At least the cleverest. It is not my people’s story — it is older than Wakanda is, older than the worship of Hanuman and Bast — but I think that is how the tale goes.”

Bucky lets the words wash over him. The smoke over his head curls like a snake; it looks like it will disappear through a knot in the woodgrain ceiling, out into the eternal world.

M’Baku says, again, “He was the first thing on earth; but he broke divine law. And there was war and chaos because of it, and bloodshed; it was the war that made the men mortal and the animals wild and the trees lose their tongues.”

Bucky isn’t sure he’s mortal. It’s been a long time since he’s felt mortal. He’s been wild, though; he knows what it is to lose the power of speech.

“He was exiled,” says M’Baku, “from divine grace; exiled from knowing himself. He is now as wild as any other animal. But he still feels the tug of the universe, senseless as he is. He walks the funeral paths, not knowing why.”

There were no funerals, Bucky thinks. Not for the people he killed; no bodies in caskets. The people he killed were never seen again.

“He will be the last to leave the mortal plane,” says M’Baku, “as he was the first to enter it. First he will guide all the other lost souls home.”

Bucky waits. But there is no more.

“I do not know why they call you that,” says M’Baku, sleepily. “The wolf’s fur turned white, when he fell, as white as your flesh.” He yawns. “Perhaps it is that and no more.”

It isn’t. It’s walking around with a past you wear on your skin; it’s redemption, the tug of it, and Bucky’s not redeemed, not nearly. He knows that. M’Baku knows that. Hell, even Steve, with his endless capacity for forgiveness, knows that.

The yawning, though, is contagious. And it’s hard to stay melancholy when you’re drunk and high and yawning fit to crack your jaw open; first him, then Steve, then M’Baku again, and M’Baku says, “I’ll show you to your room.”

It’s a single room, with two hammocks, wide and luxurious and piled with pillows, dangling by the windows across the shining wood floor. From the door, they look like they’re pressed right up to the mountains and the cosmos and the endless sky. And Steve hesitates, Steve asks, “Is this okay?” but Bucky’s too tired to argue, or maybe too intoxicated, or maybe even too — happy? Is that even a possible thing?

Whatever it is, it doesn’t matter. He bumps his shoulder against Steve’s, familiar, on the way past.

“Rogers,” he says, “I’m fucking exhausted. Go the fuck to sleep.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The story of the White Wolf here is adapted from the [creation](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_golden_wolf#In_folklore) [myth](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serer_creation_myth) of the [Serer people](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serer_people) of Senegal:
> 
>   * _The wolf plays a prominent role in the Serer religion's creation myth, where it is viewed as the first living creature created by Roog, the Supreme God and Creator. In one aspect, it can be viewed as an Earth-diver sent to Earth by Roog, in another, as a fallen prophet for disobeying the laws of the divine. The wolf was the first intelligent creature on earth, and it is believed that it will remain on earth after human beings have returned to the divine. The Serers believe that, not only does it know in advance who will die, but it traces the tracks in advance of those who will go to funerals. The movements of the wolf are carefully observed, because the animal is viewed as a seer who came from the transcendence and maintains links with it. Although believed to be rejected in the bush by other animals and deprived of its original intelligence, it is still respected because it dared to resist the supreme being who still keeps it alive._ (Wikipedia)
> 

> 
> I felt some conflict about using a mythology from Senegal in a story I've placed roughly in East Africa. African cultures are _incredibly_ diverse — there are 120 different ethnic groups in Tanzania alone — and Wakanda as presented in Black Panther is something of a [glorious](https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/23/movies/black-panther-afrofuturism-costumes-ruth-carter.html) [mishmash](https://www.fastcompany.com/90161418/meet-the-designer-who-created-black-panthers-wakanda): South Africa, Lesotho, Kenya, Ethiopia, Mali, Uganda, etc. It's hard to tease out the historical coherency of Wakanda's cultural identity except by interpreting it as a) the result of extensive movement of peoples around the continent (which is a thing! the Maasai have only been in Tanzania for 200 years) and/or b) Wakanda positioning itself as an emblem of Pan-Africanism.
> 
> I've chosen to largely look to B in how I write Wakanda. I view it as a country that's very self-conscious about its place within the African continent — a city upon a hill — and that views itself as a paragon of black achievement, although internal politics and isolation have largely prevented it from displaying itself as such to the world. This manifests in ways varying from the deeply meaningful — a culture that celebrates diversity and honors its roots and affiliations throughout Africa — to the potentially trivial to the outright xenophobic. (You'll notice a heavier Indian influence on mountain cuisine than that of the rest of Wakanda, which reflects what I've seen in modern East Africa.) It's complicated, but people are complicated, so. I think that makes sense.
> 
> Hence a wolf myth sharing many similarities with that of a culture 3,000 miles away with no obvious ties to Wakanda; hence the embrace and retelling of that myth even though it plays no role in active Wakandan religions; hence its application to a white-skinned stranger walking uncharted ways.
> 
> (I'm neither a member nor a scholar of the African diaspora, so please, take all my opinions with many grains of salt, and feel more than welcome to weigh in! <3)


	3. Chapter 3

When Steve leaves, two days later, he takes a kimoyo bead with him. 

Actually, he already has a kimoyo bead. It’s Bucky who acquires one, along with a crank-turned hand mill for his new supply of coffee — M’Baku sent him home with a heaping bag of roasted beans, and Steve’s eyes crinkled as he watched Bucky hoist it onto his shoulder for the trek back down the mountain.

Shuri shows them how to interface with the kimoyo beads, bring up holographic screens and projections of each other; how to send images and text. She also mutters about how there’s a lot more she could teach him to do if Bucky weren’t such a technophobe. Bucky holds his tongue. He’s not afraid of technology. He just — likes knowing how the things in his life _work._

Steve attends patiently, though it’s obviously review for him. This must be how he’s been keeping in touch with T’Challa. And Bucky doesn’t know how he feels about Steve being able to always reach him, all the time, but he tucks the bead in his pocket anyway, feeling it warm and solid against his thigh. He can always just leave it on a shelf.

It’s good to be home; he hasn’t been gone this long since Shuri fixed his brain. The kids swarm him when he comes over the ridge, and he nearly drops the coffee mill on one of their heads; then they’re taking the bag from him and exclaiming as they run their hands through the beans. Bucky sighs, and lets them, and leads the way back to his _banda,_ trailing kids and spilled coffee beans in his wake.

When he’s set everything down, they don’t let him rest. There are small hands in his clothing, tugging him back outside, voices peppering him with news about the turtle shell they found by the lake, and Kioko’s dog had puppies, won’t he come and see?

Kioko is one of the older boys, nine or ten. He has a long face and long skinny arms and looks serious, usually; his mother died in the June war, the one Bucky slept through. Now, he takes off with a blood-curdling yell, leading the way, and they find the puppies curled in a nest of blankets in a disused grain shed behind his family home.

The mother dog looks up at their approach with a weary, happy wag of her tail. There are five — no, six — puppies squirming at her belly, eyes closed, squeaking and suckling and writhing blindly for better access to her milk. They look like little more than helpless, furry slugs. Bucky crouches down to run a careful index finger down one of their backs, then scratches the mother dog’s ears.

“I call this one Lightning,” says Kioko, “and this one Flash —”

Steve would like this, Bucky thinks. And he suddenly remembers the kimoyo bead in his pocket.

He pulls it out, brings up the home screen, and finds the camera. The children cluster around. “What are you doing?” asks Mandere, the oldest girl, and Bucky answers, “Taking a picture.”

There’s a shriek and an abrupt throwing of themselves into the frame. And so the picture Bucky gets is mostly of Kioko’s face, a dark blur across the camera; his mouth is open with a happy shout, and you can see his teeth and the whites of his eyes. Behind him, assorted children’s limbs, flailing for attention; the mother dog’s face, looking even more beleaguered than before; and a single puppy rump, barely identifiable by its little stub of a tail.

Bucky sends the photo anyway, with the text: _Kioko’s dog had puppies._

The answer from Steve comes back a minute later. It’s a picture of him, sitting at the quinjet’s controls. He’s got his chin in his hand and the dopiest smile known to mankind on his face.

Bucky snorts out a laugh and goes to see the turtle shell.

\---

He takes to sending Steve photos. A dramatic sky, a cup of coffee, an enormous moth that flutters into his _banda_ one night, feathered antennae waving, great iridescent eyespots on its pink-brushed wings. He finds that he likes the cardamom coffee, though he likes his regular coffee too, and he spends a while arranging one of the pods to perch on the rim of his cup like a wedge on a cocktail glass to stage a photo communicating his approval.

Steve sends him photos, too, but fewer. Some are of winding alleys in dilapidated-looking souks, where passersby wear suspicious glances, looking always in the act of shying away from the photographer. Others are of ruins, ancient marvels of architecture crumbled to pieces in the sand. There are castles in rubble and fragments of friezes, the dismembered eye of a sphinx; they bear blast marks, recent ones, the kind that make Bucky think, _Goddamnit Steve, don’t go and get yourself killed._

Mostly, though, Steve sends him pictures from around the quinjet. Romanoff flipping him off with both hands across a chessboard, her black king knocked on its side. Wilson, fast asleep and curled around his wingpack, drooling onto one of its straps. The setup for a water bucket prank, propped at a precarious angle at the end of the jet’s ramp, ready to tip over onto the next person to lower it, and Bucky laughs out loud, because that’s classic Brooklyn, right there — they used to do that on mischief night, propping buckets and peoples doorknobs and ringing the bell.

He doesn’t see that one for a while after Steve sends it. When he does, he sends back: _Get anyone?_

 _Natasha dodged,_ Steve answers. _Sam got the bucket full upside down on his head._

Bucky smirks. And he thinks that maybe he could try actually calling Steve sometime.

Still, he psychs himself out about it. He thinks about it every day for a week, brings up the screen and stares at the command and runs through all the possible reasons it’s a bad idea to call Steve, he might be busy he might be fighting Bucky might freeze Steve might not want to talk to him anyway, what will he _say,_ and it’s not until he’s literally trapped in a tree that he musters the courage to do it.

It’s on one of his long excursions down the escarpment and out across the plains. They’ve gotten even longer, lately, in the hunt for new things to get pictures of, and he’s found an acacia tree he likes, way out in the savanna, with an arching umbrella of a canopy and branches that fork broadly enough to comfortably cradle even a one-armed man. It’s a good spot for napping, and he does sometimes, and one day he wakes up to discover that the shade around it is now occupied by a couple dozen enormous buffalo, lying in the grass and chewing their cuds and flicking their ears at flies.

Bucky considers his options. He could make a break for it, but there’s a lot of  them, and buffalo are notoriously ornery. It’s a thing he likes about them, most of the time, but he’s not _eager_ to get gored, all the same.

He could lie here and watch the clouds for the next — God knows how long. Or he could get over himself and call Steve.

Steve answers on the second trill of the kimoyo bead, confirming Bucky’s growing suspicion that even do-gooder undercover ops consist mostly of sitting around. “Hey, Buck,” he says, surprised delight written on every line of his face.

“Hey,” says Bucky, and then, “I got hung up. A little bored. Figured I’d call.”

There’s a way to adjust this thing so it shows more than just a projection of his torso. He finds it, fiddles with the settings, and laughs at Steve’s comically frozen expression as he registers Bucky’s tree branch, the sea of buffalo backs beyond.

“Bucky,” he says, “are you — in a tree?”

“Yep,” Bucky says.

“And are those —”

“Buffalo,” he supplies helpfully. “They got here while I was sleeping.”

“While you were,” Steve echoes.

“Congratulations, Rogers,” says a voice off-screen. “You’re officially preferable company to a herd of cows.”

It’s Romanoff. Bucky stills. But she’s coming around into view, dimpling with a little smile, so Bucky says, “Buffalo. I make no claims regarding Steve’s superiority to cows.”

“My friends just live to abuse me,” Steve complains, shifting to give Romanoff more space in the frame. “All of them. Every time.”

“Tell that to the guy you didn’t just soak in musty old desert water,” says another voice, and it’s Wilson, leaning into view. “Hey, Barnes.”

“Hey,” says Bucky, and thinks of the last time he met Wilson — an empty old warehouse, metal arm clamped in a vice the size of an elephant. Buffalo trees, he thinks, are better.

“What are you doing napping in trees, anyway?” asks Wilson. He’s smiling, teasing, like Bucky’s his friend; Bucky wasn’t counting on that. It throws him a little. “You tellin’ me you’re living in the most advanced nation in the world and they can’t give you a proper bed?”

“It’s up the hill,” Bucky answers, rolling his thumb to telescope the view — the rift wall, the long climb back home. He likes it down here, though; it’s warmer, drier. No people. He refocuses the view on himself. “Trees are comfortable.”

It’s true. His most frequent competition for these canopy perches comes from leopards, paws dangling, usually looking so relaxed it’s like their bones have melted out of their skin.

“Yeah,” snorts Wilson, “until some lion or buffalo or some shit gets you stuck up there.”

There’s an admiring tone to his voice, and Bucky thinks of what Shuri has talked about; of Wakanda’s sometimes uncomfortable status as the African diaspora’s beacon on the hill. It used to be only in their own eyes, but now it’s in the world’s; she talks about the proud ownership she sees in kids’ eyes in Oakland, and Bucky thinks he can detect it in Wilson’s, too.

“Don’t be stupid,” he says. “A lion would just climb up too.”

He winds up staying on the line for over an hour. They give him a tour of the quinjet, each of their separate sleeping quarters — though “separate” is a bit of a stretch — and they squabble like siblings, making fun of Romanoff’s black market hair care products and the way Wilson sleeps with his wingpack in the bed with him, he actually does that — “hey, you see a lot of extra space around here?” — and Steve’s sketchbook, Steve’s got an active sketchbook, which falls open to an image of M’Baku with his beer glass raised before Steve slaps it hastily closed again.

Romanoff and Wilson relent, and Bucky finds he’s smiling, thinking of how Steve always hated sharing his sketches; how he always hated showing anyone anything that wasn’t properly done. Steve's ears are flushed red now, and the sibling vibe is even stronger, but it’s — it’s not all.

Bucky hasn’t missed it, as his view tipped crazily around the quinjet — Steve’s _much_ worse at manipulating the kimoyo bead than he is. He hasn’t missed the gun locker and the rifle lying out mid-cleaning, or the disguises hanging by each of their beds — long dust-brown robes and head coverings, Romanoff’s niqab. He hasn’t missed the open chest glowing purple in the corner, and he feels a sudden, desperate pang for it all. The camaraderie, yes, but also the —

Having a job to do, and knowing you’re the man to do it. Opening your eyes to the horrors of the world and seeing that there are ways to _stop_ them. One at a time, maybe. Hard and dirty, maybe. But knowing they can be fought, and that you have the tools to do it —

That’s what Steve gave him, back in the war, with the Howling Commandos. Infantry’s different; it was nothing like infantry. The grind of waiting to see if you’ll be the next body laid down on the line. It was sure as hell nothing like being a brainwashed assassin. It was guts and brains and heart, heart mattered, and yeah, it was ugly and hard as fuck but —

Bucky misses it. He’s been on the sidelines for three years, and playing for the wrong damn team for way too long before that, but — fuck, he misses it. With every damn bone in his body.

“What’s the mission?” he says.

He sees the naked surprise on Steve’s face. Wilson’s eyes change a little, thoughtful; he studies Bucky, then glances over at Steve.

Romanoff doesn’t blink. She looks straight at Bucky and replies calmly, “Retrieve and disable advanced weapons technology of extraterrestrial origin.”

 _Mission report,_ Bucky thinks. He and Romanoff were trained by some of the same people. “Targets?”

“Extremist groups of any affiliation. If they want to kill each other, they can do it the old-fashioned way.” She gives him a sharp smile, shows her teeth.

“Lethality?”

“Authorized for armed combatants.” Steve and Wilson are both looking at her strangely, like they’ve never heard her talk like this before; that can’t be true. “Avoiding civilian casualties takes precedence over mission objective.”

Bucky nods. “Secondary objectives?”

This time, it’s Wilson who answers, a small smile on his face. “Give some evil motherfuckers a bad day.”

Sounds about right. Bucky says, “Good.”

\---

They give him and Steve the room, after that. Actually, they give them the jet — small space, not a lot of privacy — and Steve rubs a hand through his hair and says, “Sorry I can’t take you outside,” and, “We’re cloaked, there’s not really anywhere else private to go.”

“It’s fine,” says Bucky. He remembers being holed up for days, weeks, on missions, ration packs that ran out with no resupply. The sun is setting over the hills, staining the sky red and pink; he adjusts slightly so Steve can see it. “They’re good for you.”

He means Wilson and Romanoff. But he also means, sort of, the whole thing — having a mission. Being a free agent, out of those goddamn stars and stripes — being run by nothing but his own conscience, disgustingly overdeveloped as it might be. Bucky would take being run by Steve’s conscience any day.

“Would you?” Steve asks softly, even though Bucky hasn’t said a single piece of it out loud. “Want to be back out there, I mean?”

“I’ve been thinking about it,” Bucky admits. He adjusts his back, digging a knot of bark into the perpetually rigid muscles where his metal shoulder meets his flesh. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot. ‘Swhy I asked Shuri to start working on a new arm, and T’Challa to call you in.”

It slips out of his mouth casually; he doesn’t mean anything by it. But Steve’s whole body lurches, his face suddenly white with shock, and he’s saying, “Bucky — _Buck,_ you don’t have to sign up for this shit to be with me, you — I’ll quit the whole thing now, I’ll — move us to fucking _Tahiti,_ you’ll never have to see a rifle again —”

And that, despite everything, makes Bucky laugh. “What, you saying we should act our age? Buy a nice condo near the beach and hobble down to bingo every Wednesday night?”

“ _Yes,_ ” says Steve, and there are tears in his eyes, “yes, God, Buck, anything you want —”

“Hey,” says Bucky more quietly, sitting up. It’s easy to forget how alone Steve must feel, surrounded as he is by people who love him. Everyone always loves Steve, as well they goddamn should, but no one ever _got_ him like Bucky did. 

“Hey,” he says again, “Steve,” and he wants to say, _it’s what YOU want, pal, whatever you want, just let me get my head straight and then I’m there._ But that’s not what Steve needs, and it’s not really what Bucky means, either, so he swallows it down and says instead, roughly, “I had to start being me again.”

Steve stills.

“It wasn’t,” Bucky says, and goddamnit, he is not going to start crying here in this fucking tree — what will the buffalo think — “it went _deep,_ Steve, you can’t know. I — in Romania — I learned about him. Me. Bucky. I made myself,” he tries, and it’s all coming out confused, “but I wasn’t, it’s easier when you just sit there at the controls, when you don’t try to _be_ —”

He’s not making any sense. Steve’s face is streaked with tears. “Bucky,” he whispers, “you don’t gotta be anything, you —”

“But I _do,_ ” says Bucky sharply, “I _want_ to, I _am,_ and I’m — I’m _sick of being in fucking cryofreeze, Steve._ ”

He snarls that last, throws his weight into it, the full capacity of his lungs. It leaves him trembling in its wake, the leaves on his tree rustling, and there’s a startled grunting from the buffalo below. One of them rises, hindquarters first, swings its massive head around, paws the ground.

Steve is staring at him in stunned silence, misery carved in his face. And Bucky hates himself, viciously, for producing that; hates that he’s ever brought Steve anything but good.

Still, he can’t stop now. He’s breathing heavily, chest rising and falling. “It’s you,” he says. “It’s — a goddamn mission. That’s _me,_ it’s what I want.”

Steve says quietly, “It didn’t used to be.”

And Bucky freezes.

The discontent has spread through the buffalo below him. Several of them are on their feet now, huffing and lowing; one charges briefly at another before breaking off.

Steve says, “It used to be just me.”

It’s no secret, but they’ve never said it before, either of them; not as baldly as that. Steve’s always been Bucky’s compass point. The only one. He’d burn down the world, to get to Steve; he’d do anything to make Steve happy.

It was fine that way. He didn’t need convictions of his own. Steve had enough of those for them both.

“Yeah, well,” says Bucky, bitterly. “I guess people change.”

“You don’t owe the world anything,” says Steve, in an angry rush. “Goddamnit, Bucky — Natasha talks sometimes about red in her ledger, you know that? About — wiping it out. _Fuck_ that,” and he swipes the back of his hand viciously over his eyes, “fuck _all_ of that, you don’t owe anybody in the world a goddamn thing.”

“It’s not that,” says Bucky, because he understands something, suddenly, and he thinks he needs Steve to understand it too. “It’s — there’s a hell of a lot of evil motherfuckers out there, Steve.”

“And why are they your fucking problem?” demands Steve, enormous hypocrite that he is.

“They’re not,” says Bucky, honestly. “They were. For seventy years. Now, I’d — I’d much rather be theirs.”

Steve sniffs. He doesn’t look convinced.

“Not for a while,” Bucky admits. “I still — gotta get my head on straight. Gotta figure out this arm situation.” He smiles, suddenly. The buffalo are moving out, plowing furrows through long grass. Their backs gleam red in the setting sun. He should start for home. “Don’t win the war before I get there.”

Steve smiles wetly. There’s snot on his lip; he wipes it off. “You _asshole,_ ” he says, and then, “don’t do anything stupid.”

Like he could. “Pal,” says Bucky, “you’ve had a monopoly on stupid since 1942. You _attract_ stupid. You get stupider every year. You’re like a black hole for stupid; people hang out around you, and you siphon off all their stupid for yourself. They should call you Captain Stu —”

“You coulda stuck to the script,” Steve grumbles.

Bucky gives him his sweetest smile. The one the Winter Soldier used to scare the pants off people.

“Why?” he says. “You never do.”

\---

They talk more often after that. Steve leaves it up to Bucky to call, which means he doesn’t always get through; Steve’s still operating under extreme secrecy, no calls outside the jet. When he does, he spends half his time helping Sam — he started calling him Sam at some point — beat Steve and Natasha at chess. He runs through mission plans with them, too, and uses the thermal image scanner in his kimoyo bead to show them the baby sparrows in his _banda’s_ nest.

Steve’s apparently taking M’Baku’s advice to grow out a beard. It’s coming in patchy, which makes Bucky and Sam and Natasha all laugh at him mercilessly, and Steve objects that in the old days he couldn’t grow any kind of a beard at _all._

When the jet is otherwise empty, Bucky bullies Steve into showing him his sketchbook. He still hasn’t gotten him sending photos of it unprompted, but Steve usually caves when he asks him to pull it out.

Steve doodles a lot of patterns, like the inlays on Bucky’s coffee box. He sketches statues and ruins and even colors a few of them in — one is of soaring red-gold temples built into cliffs, and Bucky recognizes Petra from back when he learned about it in eighth fucking grade and vowed to himself he’d go there someday. He berates Steve soundly for going without him, and worse, not _telling_ him about it, and Steve gets quiet and tells him that the same day, they met a family of refugees picking tomatoes, and one woman told them with eyes too hollow for tears how last week, her little sister had been shot; her pregnant little sister, shot with a gun that glowed purple, bleeding out there among all the smashed tomatoes — and then they’re quiet for a minute, because sometimes there’s nothing in the world to goddamn say, until Bucky tells Steve, gently, to turn the page.

A few sketches are of pictures Bucky sent him. His buffalo tree, broad and dramatic against blue rain clouds; a termite mound, a goat. Most of his drawings, though, are of people.

There are people Bucky doesn’t know, wide-eyed children and hijab-clad women, men with beards playing backgammon with little cups of coffee at their elbows. There’s Sam and Natasha, laughing and serious and quiet, and M’Baku and T’Challa and Okoye and Shuri; but most of all, there’s page after page of Bucky.

There’s Bucky now and Bucky the Winter Soldier; Bucky in Romania and Bucky in Brooklyn, a kid, practically, and Bucky in the war. One two-page spread is of Bucky asleep: shirtless and armless, hair long, falling back from his face. It’s clear that Steve spent _time_ on this one, studied his way into the stubble on Bucky’s cheeks and the lines at the corner of his eyes; it’s from that in-between-time, after Siberia, before here. Back when Steve’s presence meant his mind was in glorious freefall that let him be a special, reckless kind of brave.

He looks tired, in the drawing; weary beyond imagining. There’s pain buried under the lines of his face, conflict, longing. But he’s — beautiful. All his flaws shine with Steve’s love.

He feels his breath catch. He remembers studying his own face in the museum, struggling to map himself into it, to feel some trace of recognition. If he’d seen this drawing, he’d have known.

“I miss you,” says Steve, in a thick voice. “I miss you — God, Buck, so much,” and Bucky says impatiently, “Come _visit,_ then,” because his eyes might prickle if he doesn’t, and because Steve’s being an idiot, Bucky’s right here, he could come visit anytime, and because — because he misses Steve too, okay, he wants Steve’s eyes looking at him like his pencil does, at all of him, _fucking hell, Steve —_

“Really?” says Steve, hope and shock on his face, and it’s been nearly three months since Christmas, yes really, what the fuck?

“It’s just,” says Steve, and he’s tripping over his words, apologetic, “last time I came, you kind of — froze solid for two days.”

Well. “No promises I won’t do it again,” says Bucky, “but I’ll give it a go if you will.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I don't have as much research flailing for you today. Some small things:
> 
>   * I can't find my Halloween in 1930s New York research and I'm cranky about it. But the doorbell prank is attested.
>   * I stole some [tomato](https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk/articles/2014-01-tomatoes/) [pickers](https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk/articles/2014-02-1981-degrees-fahrenheit/) from Paul Salopek, a journalist who's currently in the middle of a [21,000-mile walk](https://www.nationalgeographic.org/projects/out-of-eden-walk/#section-1) from Ethiopia to Tierra del Fuego. His reporting has been a big influence on how I write the world.
> 



	4. Chapter 4

The beard looks different in person. More three-dimensional, and it’s finally filling in properly; it looks — goddamnit, Steve — _good._ Steve’s grown his hair out, too, more like Bucky’s, which gives Bucky roughly an equal desire to preen and to fall on his ass laughing. He brings Sam and Nat with him this time, and they both hug Bucky after Steve does, and it feels surprisingly all right.

Shuri takes them all on a safari. Light hovercraft with a cloaking exterior — perfect for coming up close to animals without disturbing them, though Bucky still thinks he does it better on foot. Shuri pilots them out over the plains, past herds of wildebeest and zebra; they find giraffes and elephants and eland and crowned cranes, and Sam exclaims over a fish eagle because of course he does, and then utterly loses his shit when they come upon a lion kill.

They stay there for a while, watching the nearly grown cubs feast on a buffalo carcass while hyenas and a jackal stalk for scraps around the margins. On the way back they find a leopard dozing in an acacia, all effortless predatory grace, and even Natasha lifts her eyebrows, impressed.

“You see that shit on Planet Earth,” says Sam, his face a mask of dazed bliss. “But you don’t think — it’s _all in one place,_ man. I mean, _holy shit._ ”

It’s unclear who he’s talking to. It’s Shuri who responds, in tones of amused tolerance: “Yes, well. It is the dry season, when grazers congregate around water sources. And the predators tend to follow.”

“Holy _shit,_ ” says Sam again.

Steve’s been quiet this whole time, taking everything in, hovering at Bucky’s side. His eyes are on Bucky’s face as often as on the animals, and when Bucky shifts closer, experimentally, he doesn’t move away. He just stays there, warm and solid, and doesn’t flinch when Bucky’s metal shoulder brushes his chest, when Bucky’s leg comes to rest against his thigh. He just lets his fingers fall on Bucky’s hip, arm curving around his back, and every point of contact between them is a live wire. Bucky’s never felt this charged with energy; this vital, this visible, this _known._

They get back to the palace and unload from the hovercraft, but as the others start inside and Steve’s touch slips from his waist, Bucky stops dead in his tracks and blurts, “We’re going — home.”

Shuri pauses, and purses her lips. She refrains from rolling her eyes, though, just says, “Take the hovercraft, then, if you like,” and leads Sam and Natasha — who winks broadly — inside.

They don’t take the hovercraft, though. It’s only a few miles, and Bucky usually walks, and he — _feels_ like walking, wants to show Steve his paths and his kids and his _home,_ it’s his fucking home, the way it is to him. So they go by foot, Steve with his bag on his shoulders, and when they crest the hill, the children are streaming out of their houses with cries of “Captain America!” and “White Wolf!” and “Golden Labrador!” because that’s what Bucky _tried_ to get them to say, and Mandere, at least, has taken him at his word.

“Golden Labrador?” Steve mouths at him, staggering slightly as the first child hits his legs. And then Kioko is tugging at his pants and saying, “Captain America, sir, Mr. Barnes said you liked my dogs, they’re much bigger now, sir, would you like to see them?”

“Hey,” Bucky murmurs in Steve’s ear, as they follow Kioko’s urgent tugging across the yard. “You’re the one who put down that shield. They’ve got to call you _something;_ I did you a favor.”

“I have a name,” says Steve. “It’s Steve.”

“Yeah,” says Bucky, “most kids don’t get too excited about dressing up as ‘Steve’.”

“Whereas they do about labrador retrie — _hello,_ ” says Steve, because there’s now a puppy nosing at his calf, and yeah, he can argue, but the truth is he’s a mama dog through and through.

They wind up playing with kids and puppies for hours — somehow the kids convince Steve to see how many of them he can carry on his back, which, with some creative arranging, is all of them — and then get invited to stay for a big open-air dinner, roast goat and fresh fruit and creamy corn ugali. Bucky hasn’t spent much time with the children’s parents — most of them work in the city, commuting home in the evenings — but they’re all smiles and welcome, and by the the time Steve and Bucky leave for home, it’s the late side of dusk, insects singing and an owl hooting somewhere in the night.

Bucky’s skin feels warm. His belly is full, and the night is alive, anticipation prickling down his limbs. He’s got Steve on the path behind him, Steve following him through the chest-high reeds past the croaking frogs and stooping low in the doorway of his _banda_ to keep from hitting his head.

And then Bucky’s lighting the lamp and drawing the curtains and turning and it’s Steve, Steve in his own tiny hole in the world, in his space, in his heart, in his home.

He’s looking at Bucky like he’s some kind of shade of divine. He says, “Thank you,” and he doesn’t have to say for what, Bucky gets it.

He feels like his chest is overflowing. He feels like his every heartbeat is the whole tapestry of the night, flowing through him; like the golden motes in the air are the endless fragments of memory that make up their lives. He’s buzzing, too big for his skin, and Steve is looking at him, with the love of decades in his eyes, and Bucky takes two steps forward and seizes Steve’s face and kisses him.

The feel of him is overwhelming. Everything is overwhelming, Steve’s hands on Bucky’s waist and his lips on his lips and Bucky pulls him closer, kisses him harder, slides their tongues together, wills Steve to fold him up in his arms and shield him from the swelling rush of feeling, because it’s too much, too bright too real too loud, if Steve will just kiss him all the way down to his soul maybe he can —

He backs himself into the wall, pulls Steve with him, hard, chest to chest. Steve’s hands roam up his sides, too fast, so Bucky kisses him harder to compensate, to smother the crescendo building his ears and his eyes and his chest and —

It’s like being the Winter Soldier, almost, his mind a wall of sound. Only this is _good_ sound, a symphony, he’s inside the throb of a full violin —

And Steve’s thumb slips inside the collar of his shirt and brushes over his shoulder’s ridge of scars, feather-light, loving, and he can’t take it, can’t take it, can’t take it, and he hits the floor.

Steve jumps back. Bucky curls in on himself. The roar in his head is different, now; sick, ugly, _you failed, you’re a failure, you don’t know how to be human, you’ll bring him nothing but pain, you’ll never be human again —_

“Buck,” Steve is saying, and he’s on his knees, _too close,_ “Buck, please talk to me —”

“ _Haliaetus vocifer,_ ” Bucky gasps. “ _Balearica regulorum. Gypaetus barbatus. Passer domesticus —_ ” and it helps a little, but it’s not helping Steve, who’s staring at him, terrified, like he’s lost his mind, like he’s speaking in tongues, so he grates out, “Bird names. It’s a thing Shuri taught me — to help with the —”

He means to say _panic,_ but just thinking the word makes it spike, choking up inside him. He kicks, wedges himself further into the wall, digs the heel of his hand into his thigh and manages, “ _Passer domesticus._ Goddamnit, _Passer domesticus —_ ”

He can’t think of any others. They’ve flown from his head. _Passer domesticus,_ and it’s not working, so he takes his hand and shoves it between his teeth, right where his thumb meets the meat of his palm, and bites down, hard.

Not _too_ hard. Not hard enough to break skin; not hard enough to crack bone. He just bites and holds, feels the pain flare and swell where his teeth dig into his skin; feels the blood throbbing there, the other end of his heartbeat, and the pain builds, builds — holds. Steadies.

He doesn’t know how long he stays like that. Long enough for another spike of fear that Steve is going to freak out, to make him explain; long enough for that to fade again. Finally, he finds the bravery to crack his eyes open and see Steve sitting there, white-faced but unflinching, a respectful distance away. He eases his jaw open, and draws his hand free, white tooth marks on his skin.

“I’m sorry,” he breathes. His mouth feels like a foreign thing.

“What can I do?” says Steve.

There’s nothing he can do. Bucky is irrevocably fucked up; permanently mangled; he’d come so far, so fucking far, and this —

The thoughts bring a new surge of panic. And that’s stupid, panic is stupid, so thoughts that bring it are stupid, so — he stops.

Steve lets him breathe through to another calm. He should — uncurl from the floor, he should at least make it up to the bed, but the open air above him yawns like the edge of a precipice; he tries, grits his teeth, and — can’t.

Here, then. He makes himself open his eyes, look at Steve. “Weight — helps,” he manages, thinking of the heavy cloak in the mountains. “Not — motion, or — just weight.”

It sounds stupid coming out. It makes no sense; Steve won’t understand. But Steve does, approaching slowly. He blots out the light and murmurs, “This okay?” and Bucky finds that even his proximity makes him calmer. He nods his assent and uncurls his body, just a little, and Steve lowers himself to cover him, just — covers him, wraps his arms around Bucky’s body and buries his face in his shoulder and lets his weight settle over him, pressing him down, warm and enclosed and still and _safe, safe, safe._

The relief of it courses through Bucky’s limbs. The panic is fading at last, he’s down off the ledge, he’s okay. Tears are leaking from the corners of his eyes, onto the warm skin of Steve’s neck. A shuddering seizes him, and then he’s sobbing, just fucking sobbing, great gulps of air against Steve’s collarbone, and he’s trembling and trembling and Steve doesn’t let go, doesn’t ask or exclaim or pull back to see if Bucky’s all right, because of course he’s not, he’s not fucking all right, he hasn’t been all right in a long, a fucking, fucking, _fucking_ long time, but he’s safe. He’s _safe._ And that matters.

“I got snot on you,” he says, after a while. After the shaking has finally subsided. He feels light, hollowed out; like he could drift away, without Steve to anchor him down. “I was gonna say on your shirt but really just — all of you.”

“That’s okay,” says Steve, muffled against his shoulder. “Should I up now?”

Bucky manages a breathy laugh. “Yeah,” he manages. “Yeah, I think it’s okay to up now.”

Steve does, levering himself up on his forearms and peeling their bodies apart. Bucky’s skin feels sticky with sweat and tears; he wipes his face with his shirt.

“Can I make you — coffee?” Steve asks, awkwardly. “Tea?”

“Maybe water. Jug in the corner.”

Steve finds it, and the cups, and pours one for each of them. Bucky has to sit up to drink it, and that goes okay; he sips once, then downs the rest and says, “Yeah, coffee,” even though it’s already late.

“I, uh,” says Steve, looking around the tiny _banda_ ; Bucky’s stove is outside. “I might require instruction.”

“I’ll do it.” It’s good to have a task, and maybe Steve gets that, because he doesn’t object, just follows Bucky outside and sits on the bench and watches him blow on the cooking stove’s embers until they flare to life.

It’s also good to be outside, where it’s dim and the air is cool on his skin. He gives Steve the mill to grind the coffee and then says again, carefully, “I’m sorry.”

Steve’s hand stills where it’s about to start turning the crank. “Don’t be,” he says, emotion rough in his voice. “I — is there anything I should have done differently?”

Bucky jerks his head in quick denial. “It’s my fault. I didn’t — I was getting overwhelmed. With good things, not bad ones, but — I should’ve read the signs.”

Steve nods, like he’s not too shocked by this. Maybe he understands what it is to be uselessly afraid.

When the coffee is ground, Bucky pours it into the press he built and sits back to wait for the water to boil. Steve says, “It can be — hardest to be around the people who know you best. That’s what Sam says, anyway.”

Bucky considers that, watching bubbles begin to rise in the pot. Steve swallows audibly and adds, “He says some — soldiers who’ve come back struggle with trust. They distance themselves because — shit. This is coming out wrong.” He breathes out carefully, raking a hand through his hair.

“No,” says Bucky slowly. He understands, he thinks, though he can’t pretend it doesn’t put an ache in his chest to know that he hurt Steve enough to make him ask, or enough that Sam saw it and felt the need to volunteer. “I get it, I think.” He sucks his upper lip against his teeth. Because he’s never asked, not really, and he’s not the only one of them who’s been through hell. “Did that happen with you?”

Steve makes a light little laugh. Self-deprecating. “Buck,” he says, “everyone who knew me was dead _._ ”

It hits like a physical blow. And yeah, there’s a reason why he’s never thought about this; because the idea of Steve waking up alone and still-young and terrified, in a new world, surrounded by strangers, the thought of that panic and that gulf of loneliness, makes him want to rip whole mountains to the ground.

“They gave me the files,” Steve’s saying. “All our old friends, ‘deceased.’ You weren’t in there, they knew I knew you were dead.” He chokes out another of those laughs. “Everyone gone but Peggy.”

Bucky sits bolt upright. He nearly knocks the pot over; it clatters, then settles back on the stove. “Peg’s _alive?_ ”

“She died a little before I found you. In her sleep.” Steve doesn’t reach to take his hand, but he snags Bucky’s gaze with his eyes. They’re warm, reassuring. _I’m telling you about a good thing,_ they say. “She was ninety-six when I woke up. She’d — God, she’d lived a life.”

His voice is admiring. A rightness settles in Bucky’s bones. At least one of them got to. “Did you see her?”

“It took me some time to work up the courage,” Steve admits. “There was the whole thing in New York, and — well. But yes.”

“How was she?” Bucky breathes.

Steve’s eyes are shining. “Gorgeous as ever.”

Bucky laughs out loud. Because that’s not true, he knows it isn’t; ninety-six-year-olds don’t look like they did in their twenties, not real ninety-six-year-olds, but who the hell cares? It _is_ true, too, he knows it is, because Steve is saying it’s so.

“God,” he says, “she musta been pissed at you.”

Steve bursts out laughing. “She’d had some time to forgive me,” he says. “Not that I deserved it. She was always the — God, she was the best of us.”

“Yeah, she was.” The water is boiling; he pours it into the press, swirls it lightly to stir the grounds. He’s never been patient enough to wait as long as he should, so he compensates by brewing it strong, a heaping mound of coffee grounds in the water. Still, he forces himself to wait a minute before he filters and pours.

Peggy goddamn Carter. He tried his best to give Steve to her. He’d’ve liked to see them get out of that damn mess of a war; go raise flocks of morally unimpeachable babies with no sense of the better part of valor. It would’ve been a damn fine legacy, if he’d managed.

He pours the coffee, and passes a cup to Steve. Then he raises his own. “Peggy Carter.”

“Peggy Carter,” Steve agrees, toasting with his own mug, then taking a long drink of coffee. “Got anything to Irish this up?”

“I _am_ half Irish,” says Bucky, and goes to find the liquor.

\---

They stay up half the night talking and reminiscing, until even the owls have quieted and the air is chilly enough that Bucky retrieves a blanket from inside. They wrap it around their shoulders and sit on the bench, leaning back against the wall of his _banda,_ watching the progress of the stars.

They switched to straight whiskey hours ago, and Steve doesn’t get drunk, but Bucky’s got a pleasant buzz going, drinking at just the right pace to hold it there. Steve says, “I went back to the Whip & Fiddle, after you died.”

There’s nothing he can say to that. Bucky bumps his shoulder against Steve’s, hard, in solidarity.

“It was bombed out,” says Steve, “but there were all these liquor bottles, still, dusty but not broken. So I drank them. It didn’t do anything. Just me at this fucking table, and everything all ash, and — Peg found me.”

He goes quiet. Bucky says, “You ever get that dance?”

Steve laughs. “We _did._ In a wheelchair. She was in a nursing home. She made me dance with all of her friends, after, it was a whole party —”

Bucky snorts at the image. “Bet she loved that.”

“Yeah,” Steve breathes. “Yeah, she — we made a date. As I was on the plane. Going down.”

Bucky’s breath catches. It hurts to think of them, like that; young and desperate and so fucking, fucking brave. “That wasn’t in the papers,” he says. He knows; he forced himself to read them all.

“She never told anyone,” says Steve. And then he’s laughing again. “They made — God, they made radio plays about us, Buck, and they’re the _worst fucking things,_ she made me listen to one — said if she’d been subjected to a lifetime of them, I could handle fifteen minutes. Bucky, I _couldn’t._ It was so bad.”

He’s going to have find those and use them to mock Steve forever. That’s what’s going through Bucky’s head; what comes out his mouth, somehow, is “What was it like? Coming back?”

“It was…” Steve tips his head back, and takes a long moment to answer. “What you said,” he offers finally, “about just sitting at the controls, not being _you_ — it was like that, I think.”

“Yeah,” breathes Bucky. It makes sense.

“Seeing Peg helped,” Steve adds. “But I felt — so _bad_ about it for the longest time, like I was bringing this ghost into her life she never asked for —” Bucky jerks with a reflex toward furious denial, but Steve plows on — “and then you showed up, and I — it was like my blood started pumping again. I don’t even,” and he’s laughing, shaking his head.

“I know the feeling, pal,” says Bucky.

“I have no idea why the Avengers let me in,” Steve confesses. “I was such a dick then. I was — I don’t know.”

“What I hear,” Bucky points out, “the Stark kid’s kind of a dick himself.”

“Well, yeah,” Steve admits, “but he’s a _funny_ dick, at least.”

“Steven Grant Rogers,” says Bucky, reproachfully. “You’re _hilarious._ ”

That cracks Steve up like he means it to. But he’s still shaking his head, saying, “With them, though — not Sam and Nat, they’re different, but when we’re all together — it’s not like I don’t love them, it’s just — every fucking time,” he says, suddenly, vehemently, “I start thinking about the Howlies, and I — I hate them a little, Buck, I really do.”

He says it like it’s his deepest secret, his worst truth. _Pal,_ Bucky thinks, _if that’s so, you’re doing pretty damn well._

“There was this time,” says Steve, like he’s dredging up a horrible ghost from his past, “when I scolded Tony for saying ‘shit’. I said — _Language._ ”

He enunciates it like a parody of a schoolmarm, all scandalized and imperious. Bucky bursts out laughing.

“I don’t know what I was doing,” Steve’s saying, haunted. “I don’t — I curse all the time, Bucky! I was in the fucking army, for God’s sake!”

Bucky’s wheezing; he can’t find his breath. Helpless giggles rattle loose of his chest every time he tries. “I hate you,” says Steve.

Bucky manages a great gasp of air. His sides ache from laughing. “Steve,” he manages. “Steve, it’s _Falsworth._ ”

Steve turns to stare at him.

“Don’t you remember,” says Bucky, “Dugan’d be cursing up a blue streak, all New York Irish of him, cock-sucking dog-fucking mothers of whores —”

Comprehension is dawning on Steve’s face. “And then we got it to work —” because they’re both remembering the same thing, the lot of them trying to jumpstart a tank, you ever tried to jumpstart a fucking Tesseract-powered tank? — “and Gabe goes, ‘damn’, like appreciative, and Falsworth goes —”

“ _Language!_ ” They say it together, haughty and horrified, both of their British accents terrible, and then Steve’s cracking up, clutching Bucky’s shirt and doubled over, the whole massive frame of his body shaking.

“And we’d all —” Bucky wheezes, “we’d all do it after that, but you were the best at it, because you had such a fucking poker face, all clean-cut Captain America telling you to buy war bonds and eat your peas and watch your _mouth_ —”

“Didn’t teach me that in the USO,” Steve chokes, “the way those girls talked woulda made _Dugan’s_ hair curl —”

“— if it wasn’t already,” says Bucky, and then, “I love you.”

“Yeah,” says Steve, “yeah, you too,” and he presses his nose to Bucky’s neck and Bucky cups Steve’s face in his hand to hold him there, and watches the dawn come.


	5. Chapter 5

Bucky’s arm is going to be vibranium.

He probably should’ve worked that out. It’s Wakanda, after all, everything’s vibranium, his goddamn coffee grinder is vibranium, but he’s going to have a _vibranium arm,_ and that’s about the coolest fucking thing he’s ever seen.

“This is only a mockup,” says Shuri. “The competed product will have all vibranium inner workings, too, for near-frictionless operation. I don’t have a functional version for you to try out yet, but —”

“What’s this do?” Bucky interrupts, pointing to a hollow chamber in the plans for the forearm, projected large in the air before them.

“It’s a weapons chamber,” says Shuri. “Completely interchangeable; we have options ranging from tranquilizer darts to a submachine gun —”

“No,” says Bucky, and glances at Steve. “I don’t want it. I can carry the weapons I need.”

Shuri tilts her head and fiddles with the diagram. “If we eliminate the weaponized compartments we can increase neuroreceptor resolution by —” She does a speedy calculation. “Fifty percent.”

“Will that be overwhelming?” Steve asks, frowning.

“All sensory channels will be tunable,” Shuri assures him. “Neurologically, but with a mechanical failsafe. Now —” she glances at Bucky. “Mapping this model into your sensory system will require some alterations to the existing connections in your shoulder.”

Bucky swallows. Surgery. “Why?”

He recognizes the way Shuri’s nostrils flare; she’s angry. At him? He glances at Steve.

“We’ve mocked up a full suite of neuroreceptors for you,” says Shuri, in clipped tones. “To detect light touch, pressure, texture, temperature, even some chemosensors. This is how the actual human sensory system behaves. As far as I can tell, the designers of your previous arm were primarily concerned with your proprioception — your sense of where your arm is in space. They devoted far less effort to skin-based sensation.”

Bucky blinks. All this makes sense to him; why is she angry?

“The only sensors they gave you,” she says, “were very crude ones — analogous to free nerve endings in the skin. Those can detect a variety of stimuli — pressure, temperature, some chemicals — but they all transmit to the central nervous system through nociceptory pathways. In other words, as pain.”

Oh.

The room is silent as Shuri’s words sink in. Then Steve stands abruptly, kicks a chair into the wall.

Bucky takes two swift steps toward him. “Steve —”

Steve’s breathing hard, back turned, shoulders high. His face is to the window.

Bucky lays a tentative hand on his back. “Steve. It’s okay.”

“They made you experience everything as pain, Buck,” says Steve, and his voice trembles with the effort of calm, but there’s a snarl in it, too. “How is that fucking okay?”

Which, okay, yeah, when you put it like that. It never seemed like that big a deal at the time; he more or less wrote it off as the body’s general unhappiness with having one of its limbs replaced by a metal one. To have an arm and have it feel _normal,_ like — _his_ —

“We can do this the right way,” says Shuri. “But only if we assign new neuronal connections; the information needs a way to get to your brain. Right now, we can only access the pain channel.”

Surgery. Bucky closes his eyes for a moment. “All right.”

“It won’t hurt,” says Shuri more gently, as if that’s the problem, “and you won’t need to be anesthetized, unless you want to.”

Bucky nods. He glances at Steve, still hunched, not turning. He says, “Can he be there?”

Steve jerks with surprise. His eyes, when he turns, are wide with hope.

“Yes,” says Shuri. “We’ll need time, though, to work up the plans. For now, I’m hoping to scan your existing arm — we’d like to get them as symmetrical as possible.”

“Scan _his_ arm,” says Bucky, poking Steve; “I wanna be a hunk,” but he submits, and it’s not bad, actually. They don’t even need to strap his wrist and elbow down to keep him still; Shuri wraps his arm instead in a fine mesh net studded with glowing points of light that shrinks down to size over his skin. The scan, she explains, will use these as a grid of reference, rather than absolute space.

After, they take Sam and Natasha to meet the kids. Mandere absolutely loses her shit over Sam, and makes him strap on his wingpack to fly her around. He stays low, letting her toes skim the grass, but she shrieks with delight anyway, and then all the kids have to get a turn.

“You’d think they didn’t live in a futuristic society surrounded by fancy vibranium planes and hoverbikes,” mutters Bucky.

“About that,” says Natasha, on his left. “Isn’t it — weird? That they have access to so much, and choose to live out here and herd goats?”

Bucky shrugs. “From what I hear, Americans are doing it all the time.”

That makes her laugh. Then Kioko is tugging on her sleeve and saying, “Excuse me, ma’am, would you like to come see my puppies?”

\---

Steve finds his notebook of bird names that evening, the running list of everything he’s seen, and with Bucky’s nod of permission, he pulls it from the shelf. “I didn’t know there _were_ this many birds,” he says, and Bucky shrugs and says, “Get out of the city once in a while, pal,” but he comes over and pages through to show Steve the ones he’s seen; the lammergeier from Jabariland and the fish eagle and the crowned crane, the bee-eater they saw posed by the lake this morning, the sparrows that nest at his _banda._

“Those I know,” says Steve, and when Bucky goes outside to start on dinner, he follows, notebook in hand. Bucky turns around sometime later to see that Steve’s sketched a pair of sparrows next to their name, inside the outline of a nest; he’s adding the facial markings as Bucky comes over to look.

“I can erase it,” he says, “if you don’t want —” and Bucky puts his chin on his head and says, “I want.”

He takes Steve the next day to the buffalo tree, making the long trek down to the plains. He shows Steve the elephant caves — a steep muddy slope of where they come to eat the minerals from the soil itself, chipping away hollows in the spongy rock and leaving long, smooth tusk marks behind. He shows him the secret streams that spring from the base of the escarpment, and the trees that have leaves like hands full of knives.

Steve keeps adding to his notebook. He prevails on Shuri for some colored pencils, and starts filling in the birds he’s already sketched; he moves on to the more colorful ones, too, sunbirds and starlings and lilac-breasted rollers, the smaller savanna hornbills with their black and white plumage and brilliant red-orange beaks. He snorts with laughter when Bucky finds him a male vervet monkey with its brilliant aquamarine ballsack, and draws it on the very last page of his notebook, tail twitched away for an unobscured view, head turned around with its mouth a tiny, scandalized _o_ of surprise.

“You missed your calling,” Bucky tells him. “You shoulda been a pinup artist.”

They sleep together in Bucky’s bed, but they don’t try again for anything more, and Bucky finds that doesn’t bother him as much as he expects. He likes being big spoon — he’s got the perfect geometry for it, his status as the one-armed wonder has certain advantages — and yeah, some nights it feels like too much, too close, but on others Steve wakes him from the nightmares before they really start, and he never objects when Bucky has to take a blanket outside to spend the rest of the night half-dozing on the stoop.

“Do you ever get terrified,” Steve murmurs one night, into the darkness, “of being happy? That something will upend it all again? Or that you’ll finally have to deal with all the things you told yourself were fine, and that might be even worse?”

Bucky almost laughs. “All the fuckin’ time, pal,” he says, and pulls Steve closer all the same.

\---

It can’t last forever.

Natasha gets a call that weekend from one of her old KGB contacts; their targets are on the move. The three of them leave the next day, and Bucky feels a surge of pride, watching Steve board the jet. It’s stronger than he expects, and cracks onto his face as a smile. Half of him wishes he were going, too.

Only half, though. He’s not ready. He’s getting there, but he isn’t ready yet.

He works out that day, pushing himself hard, running down the escarpment and up again and doing one-armed pullups on a tree limb. He won’t have to worry about the strength of his new arm, just his own ability to wield it. His old one, though — maintaining a body takes work.

The next day, he goes in to Shuri’s lab.

He’s never spent too much time in Mt. Bashenga — labs make him nervous on principle, though Shuri’s has big glass windows and brightly painted murals and Shuri, who’s the best antidote he knows to feeling crushed in an institutional machine. He hovers by her shoulder and watches her work until she lets out an exasperated sigh and puts him to work assembling prototypes of his new mechanoreceptors — careful work under a microscope, because, as she says, “We’ll automate it later.”

Bucky learns the difference between Meissner and Ruffini and Pacinian corpuscles. He learns that Shuri loves to tinker and hates to code, finds it the most tedious thing in the world, so it doesn’t take too much persuasion to convince her to set him to it himself. There’s something calming about working through the logic and the progressions, about troubleshooting the errors in his execution and testing the sequence by assembling a hundred tiny synthetic Ruffini endings without the damn twitchy little tools.

“Yes, fine,” says Shuri, when he presents them to her, and sets him to work on the Meissners.

Peggy taught him a little decryption, back in the war. This is like that, in a way — keeping track in your head, drawing the logical triangulations between what might work and what you’ve tried.

At the end of the day he comes to Shuri and says, “I want to see the plans for the nervous system relay.”

He takes them home and studies them, but there are things in there he doesn’t understand — hell, he went darkside before they’d discovered DNA. He comes home the next night with a pile of medical textbooks, and the next with one on electrical engineering, and then with a monograph by Shuri’s grandmother on the applications of Einsteinian principles to work with vibranium.

He likes that one a lot — it’s elegant and clear, with cogent lines of argument and far-reaching implications — so the next day he makes Shuri find his own copy that he can write in.

By the end of the week, he understands why some nerves are myelinated and how vibranium can be wired to replicated their effects. He’s started to get a handle on the various implications of its vast array of possible crystalline and noncrystalline structures. Its thermodynamics are truly weird — he brushes up on thermodynamics — and it can be used to achieve remarkable things, even in solid state. It is, in short, a scientist’s playground. Not that Bucky’s a scientist, but hell, you don’t hang around Howard Stark and Shuri of Wakanda without learning a few things.

The next Monday, he asks Shuri for pain receptors.

They’re not in the plans, which makes sense. But pain serves a biological function — a warning sign — and what’s the point of having the world’s most advanced prosthetic limb if he can’t troubleshoot it himself?

“Not on the exterior,” he explains. “Well, on a couple places — I’ve mapped them on the diagram — but in the mechanical components. I need to know if they malfunction, right?”

“If you’re so set on it,” Shuri snaps, “we can give you warning lights.”

She’s in a bad mood — Oakland City Council is hanging up her proposal to set up a functioning lab at the outreach center, trying to extort detailed documentation on vibranium under the guise of materials safety — but Bucky ignores it. He says, “I’ve _got_ a warning system. It’s very well designed. We can calibrate pain levels to go asymptotic well shy of any debilitating thresholds —”

“Fine,” snaps Shuri, “design it,” so he does.

He starts to get to know the other members of the Wakanda Design Group. They’re more helpful than Shuri, a lot of the time — she’s been playing with vibranium practically since infancy, but the others know what it’s like to learn. He finds another monograph from Shuri’s grandmother, tucked away in a deep recess of Mt. Bashenga’s library, about the theoretical effects of vibranium on Wakandan plant life. It contains the germ of an idea for the use of sand-sized vibranium particles in engineering applications, one she expanded in her later work and Shuri has brought to life. It also hypothesizes that the heart-shaped herb is not genetically distinct, but rather, a highly modified morphotype of a common plant that grows along sandy river courses throughout the country.

He starts paying more attention to the plants, on his morning runs. There’s a sandbar in a certain stream that cuts down the escarpment, far off any but the roughest game trails, where the dark sheen of vibranium forms a band along the river’s outside curve. There are herbs growing on the sandbar’s level top; Bucky considers them, digs up a few, and replants them in the darkest part of the streambed.

He runs in the mornings, now, and spends less time wandering at random through the bush; he has work to do in the lab. He also spends less time just hanging out with Steve and the others on the jet. He projects them into the lab, sometimes, but he often has to tune them out to focus.

He starts using his rooms in the city more, though. They’re closer to the lab, and have more space to store his books, and he can catch Steve from there, sometimes, find a few quiet minutes out on the balcony under the lemon tree to sit and talk.

It’s one such evening — both of them sipping coffee, because they’re fucking terrible at sleeping, might as well embrace it — when there’s a clatter and a frantic murmur of voices and Steve’s eyebrows draw together and he gets up, hurrying out of the frame, leaving his kimoyo bead on the table and Bucky to stare at his empty chair.

“Can’t go in as prisoners and guards when the prisoners are all _kids,_ ” Sam is saying, and Natasha, “we need to go aerial, then,” and Steve, “they want me, then _I_ should go in, we did it in the war,” and Sam, “this is not World War II and it’s not fucking _Hydra headquarters,_ Steve!”

“No,” says Steve, “it’s _children,_ ” and Bucky says, “what’s going on?”

All three of them have come into view, strained and furious-looking; Natasha gives him a look that says _nothing good_ but it’s Sam that answers, “A militia group in an area we’d cleared out made Steve. They took over a small military base a few weeks back, and we heard but didn’t think much of it ‘cause we’d already cleaned it out — figured we’d swing by again when we finished with the Lebanon faction, but —”

“They’ve been taking _kids,_ ” Steve interrupts, grimly. “Grabbing ‘em off the streets, Buck, and storing them in there, and now they’ve got plans to put up a video — Nat scrambled it for now, but —”

“They’re going to announce to anyone listening that they want Captain America,” Natasha says grimly. “And they’ll keep executing children ‘til they get him.”

“Christ.” Bucky sits up. “Even if you can get all the kids out —”

“Our cover is probably blown. Yeah,” says Natasha. 

“ _Fuck_ our cover,” snaps Steve, pacing. “I’ll — we gotta turn me over, Nat. It’s the only way.”

“Like hell it is,” snaps Sam.

Bucky interrupts, hating the words even as he says them. “It’s the smart play.”

Sam whirls to gape at him, so Bucky talks quickly, laying out the case. “Lets you two get close, right? You’re the ones turning him in. Whatever way you’re running the assault, it’s better to start closer. And you can always trust Steve to give you thirty seconds; hell, even when he was a toothpick he could give you thirty seconds.”

“A minute,” Steve objects.

“Thirty seconds,” says Bucky. “You’re bigger now, but you’ve lost the element of surprise.”

“It could work,” says Natasha slowly. “If Sam has his wingpack on under his robes, and can lift us over the fence —”

“You know I can,” says Sam. He’s got his arms crossed, his face dark. “But you also know the minute things go south, they’ll start killing kids.”

“You need a diversion,” says Bucky.

“I can be a damn good diversion,” growls Steve.

“Not good enough,” says Natasha. “We know their numbers; they’ve got the kids in old barracks, and four guards to a building.”

“If I go aerial —” Sam starts.

“That’s a fucking suicide mission,” snaps Natasha. “You saw their RPGs and anti-aircraft —”

Bucky says, “Let me do it.”

All three of them turn to stare at him.

“You let Shuri test her remote piloting interface on the jet,” Bucky says. “It’ll work. I can keep them distracted. And if they shoot me down — well, you’re out a plane, but not a man.”

Sam looks startled, but Steve’s already nodding. “We’ll store what we can in that cave. Anything sensitive stays on the plane. Buck, if you go down, you pull the internal self-destruct, all right? We might get out of this without being exposed.”

“Got it,” says Bucky.

“All right,” says Steve. “What are we waiting for? Let’s move.”

\---

Shuri is in Oakland with Nakia, managing the outreach center’s permitting process in person. It’s the middle of the day there, so Bucky calls her as he moves swiftly through the palace and onto the hovercar that runs to Mt. Bashenga.

“Steve needs a pilot,” he says without prologue. “Mind if I test-run the non-Wakandan RPO?”

Shuri looks distracted. “Let me know how it goes,” she says, absently, and swipes him away.

The lab is dark and quiet; not even Barasa is working on his project, which often keeps him up half the night. Bucky hesitates, considering; then he takes a hard right into the lab where they’ve been working on his arm.

There’s a prototype out on the table. It’s lightweight steel and completely nonfunctional, a duller silver than his last one, but it’ll do the job. He straps it onto his shoulder — the dead weight of it feels strange — and descends to the sand tables on the level below.

His single kimoyo bead has long since grown to a full bracelet. He removes one, thumbs the sequences he needs, and drops it in the sand.

It transforms instantly, the pedestal sinking away and a pilot’s seat rising in its place. All around him, the interior of the quinjet appears, in sudden, holographic projection. He slides into the seat.

“Project mode on,” he says, to make his own form flicker into being, and he hears Sam’s voice say, “Whoa, that’s weird.”

He comes around the chair and into view. He’s swathed in robes and nearly unrecognizable, flickering a little at the corner of the projection — it has its limits — and then Steve says, “Buck — your arm.”

“It’s just a mock-up,” says Bucky. “Doesn’t do anything. For appearances.”

He’s wearing black, with his hair loose around his face. He doesn’t have the mask anymore, but neither did the Winter Soldier they announced to the world after Vienna. Appearances are what matter.

Steve swallows, visibly. He’s dressed in American clothes, his identity as obvious as possible. More quietly, he asks, “You sure you’re all right with this?”

“Yeah,” says Bucky. He is.

“Let’s move out,” says Natasha, coming into view, completely unidentifiable behind thick fabric. “Bucky, I’ve got our coordinates programmed into the nav system. Wait on Steve’s signal. When we go in, the goal is as much chaos as possible. Sam and I will get the kids — you keep their eyes in the air.”

Bucky nods his understanding.

“Steve will be doing Steve things, no doubt,” Natasha adds, drily. “Hard to brief you on that.”

That makes Bucky laugh outright. “Believe me,” he says, “I know how you feel.”

They put a hood over Steve’s head to conceal him before they leave the jet. The waiting, once Bucky’s alone, is tense — he has comms in the patch behind his ear, but no one’s saying much. He watches their trackers move on the nav system; they’re approaching slowly, on foot.

He fires up the engines when they reach the compound walls. The jet feels good, familiar; he hasn’t flown it since the raid on the Raft. He lifts off when Steve’s tracker moves inside the walls, and he can see the landscape laid out before him: dark voids and intermittent spangled strings of electric light. He glides over it silently, a patchwork of buildings and rubble, sliding into the night.

He can hear the militia leadership talking in Arabic, faintly, over Steve’s comms. They’re debating whether to publicly execute him or sell him back to the American government. Steve’s breathing is calm, regular. The compound comes up in Bucky’s sights.

“In position,” he murmurs.

“Same,” comes Natasha’s voice.

Steve’s signal is not subtle.

“Hey,” he says loudly, “you might want to check these ropes,” and Bucky is shaking his head at what a fucking dork Captain America is when the first body comes flying out of what a moment ago was the solid wall of a building.

There are chunks of debris everywhere, and then Steve’s out, too, punching the hole in the wall wider and seizing the rifle off the man who fell. More fighters are pouring out after him, and out of the surrounding buildings, and the roof is tilting, collapsing, throwing dust in the air.

Thirty seconds. Bucky counts in his head. Steve’s throwing kicks and punches, ramming the rifle butt into a guy’s head, wheeling through the air; his captors seem reluctant to use lethal force, for now, but more of them are reaching for their guns. Five… four… three… two…

Bucky jams the cloaking button, drops the power on the rotors, and settles the jet into view like an enormous black bird.

There are shouts all around him, men pointing up at the sky; he turns on the jet’s high beams to plow a bright furrow through them, and they stagger back, shielding their eyes. There’s dust whipping up around him as he sinks closer and closer to earth, his own miniature tornado, and he turns the cabin lights on so his projected torso is as visible as possible, dips the jet’s nose low and fires one warning shot, another, the first plowing harmless into the ground, the second setting an electrical pole ablaze. Sparks fly through the night.

It’s about fear. It’s always about fear: get them panicked, acting irrationally, throwing all their firepower at him —

He hits the PA system, puts on his best dead eyes, his most fanatical devotion to kill. “You have Captain America,” he says, in a voice that echoes out over the roar of his rotors. “I want him.”

And the compound erupts.

There are men pouring out of barracks, weapons being hoisted to shoulders. Steve knocks down the two guys closest to him while they’re distracted, but another is running forward, aiming the RPG gun that sits like a cannon on his shoulder, and he gets knocked back by the blast as it fires —

— and Bucky slams down the throttle, shooting up into the night.

Piloting a jet from a couple thousand miles away is a surreal experience. His view pitches and rolls, but his body doesn’t; he throws the plane into a twisting dive and nearly brushes the roof of a building before taking off again. He’s got all their attention, now, and as he soars clear again, he can see Sam and Natasha helping the first stream of children through a hole in the fencing and out into the night.

Time to redouble his efforts. He shoots off another few blasts into the air, rolls to dodge a missile, and shears off through the darkness again, dipping his wing low enough between two of the buildings to knock the men there flying. There’s a growing circle of downed men around Steve, but others are starting to organize; a garage door opens, and that’s a goddamn missile launcher they’re driving out, pivoting toward him —

“Shield your eyes,” says Bucky into his comms, and fires his flare guns.

God, he loves flare guns. The blasts of light and smoke have the nearest combatants doubling over, arms flung up over their faces, and Bucky takes the opportunity to blast the missile launcher into pieces. It goes up in flames, erupting. He swerves away, barrel rolling, and fires the flares again, twists into a tight corkscrew around the compound so the jet’s body will shield Sam and Nat and the kids, then fires a barrage: flare, flare, flare, flare, flare.

He doesn’t know how long he keeps at it. He’s nearly shot out of the sky more times than he can count; if he were experiencing the plane’s motion in real life, he’d be thrown from his seat again and again, restraints snapped, head knocking against the walls. He doesn’t want to think about what kind of shape the quarters behind him are in — he hopes Steve put his sketchbook somewhere safe — but this is no time to worry about that.

The flares would probably render his vision entirely useless, knockoff supersoldier serum or no, if he were flying this thing in real life. Instead, they’re filtered through the remote piloting system’s screens, down to manageable levels, and he can see men on the ground, in chaos, gunmen shooting each other in their confusion. He doesn’t stop, though, just keeps diving and screaming through the militia’s ranks, until the adrenaline is thick and metallic in his throat and Steve’s saying, “We’re clear, Buck, you can disengage,” and Nat, “we’ve got the kids, they’re safe,” and Sam, “that was some motherfucking _flying,_ man!”

It was. It was some motherfucking flying. It was some Winter Soldier flying, riding the grinding edge of reckless, seizing the chances everyone else in the world won’t. Even back in those days, he knew that half his power was that he was alien, implacable, absolute in his brutality. He remembers hurling cars out of his path, swinging his full weight into a punch, twisting the death trap of a helicopter’s whirling blades straight for Steve.

He sets the jet down at the recon point, cloaking enabled again. He stumbles out of the cockpit and powers down the simulation. He makes his way up to open air and sits there with his back to a rock, shaking despite the warmth of the night, until the quiet pink and gray of daybreak finally begin to smudge the sky.


	6. Chapter 6

After that, Bucky pilots for Steve more often.

He doesn’t freeze up during missions. He gets the job done with a clear-eyed efficiency he’s beginning to recognize from himself in the old days — in the war, before the Winter Soldier. That’s good; he thinks that’s good, at least.

There’s a courtyard tucked in next to one of the labs on Mt. Bashenga, with trees that flower year round and birds that come to nest in them. There’s a corner behind the bougainvillea where none of the lab windows have a view, and that’s where he goes, after his flights, to press his eyes closed and clench and unclench his fist and run the bird names through his mind, listen to the chatter of the weavers and the shrill chirps of the sunbirds until the world steadies and the sun seems the right amount of bright.

He doesn’t tell Steve about that. Steve seems to know anyway, maybe, or it might just be coincidence that the next time he’s in Wakanda he says one day, casually, “I haven’t had an asthma attack in seventy-five years.”

Bucky blinks. Steve goes on, “But I still — every time I’m underwater, or breathing smoke — I’m terrified of having one. It _feels_ almost like I’m having one. But I’m not.”

Bucky thinks of all the buildings they blew up, back in the day; all the smoke in his and Steve’s lungs. “You never said.”

“Yeah, well.” Steve shrugs. “I thought it might go away. It never did. Or at least, it hasn’t yet. But it hasn’t ever stopped me from being able to do something, either.”

Bucky considers, then nods, and that’s all they say of it.

Steve comes and goes more often now, sometimes alone, sometimes with Sam and Natasha. He’ll drop them off somewhere, or they’ll drop him off, stopping only briefly to say hello. “We’re going to the _beach,_ ” Nat says one day, leaning out of the ramp in an enormous sunhat as Sam hovers the jet over the plaza. She’s already dressed in a stylish one-piece swimsuit, eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses. “If you losers don’t want to come —”

“Unfortunately,” calls Steve, jogging backward toward Bucky through the wind off the jet’s rotors, “both these losers are highly recognizable internationally wanted criminals. Have fun, though. Stay safe. I still think you could rock a bikini —”

Natasha flips him off. Bucky yells, “Want me to give him a matching scar?” to which she replies, “yes, please,” and then the jet is lifting off again, streaking away to the east.

“Where are they going?” Bucky asks.

“Maldives, I think,” says Steve. “Somewhere off the beaten path. No extradition.”

It occurs to Bucky that Natasha has been his ally and his enemy and his ally again and he’s never actually apologized for shooting her through the belly to hit another man’s heart.

It’s — complicated, thinking through the Winter Soldier stuff. There are ways that it cripples him but there are also ways that it doesn’t, and he suddenly needs to test his theory on Steve.

“Sorry I shot you,” he says.

Steve blinks. He looks a little surprised. He says, “Buck, you know that’s forgiven.”

Bucky’s heart rate is normal. His breathing is normal. He nods his head and says, “Thanks.”

\---

Steve’s not there when M’Baku and his contingent of Jabari warriors come down from their mountains for formal talks with T’Challa. They reject the offer of a jet to transport them and march up the main avenue streaked in body paint, rings of grass around their hips, chanting loudly enough to draw onlookers from blocks around. Watching from the plaza with T’Challa and the rest of the royal family, Bucky can see M’Baku’s shit-eating grin and can’t help grinning back a little himself. The man knows how to put on a show.

Shuri and Nakia are both home for the negotiations. Bucky stays away, generally — he’s got work to do, no interest in entangling himself in delicate Wakandan politics so long as he can avoid it — but he joins the big state dinners every night, tries to sit down at the end of the table with N’Koma and the rest of the Jabari guard until Shuri or M’Baku inevitably drags him up to join them at the high table.

Bucky’s not clear on Nakia’s formal status within the royal family — she and T’Challa haven’t had any sort of wedding ceremony — but she sits at his left with Shuri and Ramonda. She’s been traveling widely, enough that Bucky still doesn’t feel he really knows her at all, exploring possible sites for the next Wakanda Outreach Center. From what Bucky understands, Brazil was the leading candidate before getting hung up in financial negotiations. Now, the debate is between moving ahead with a center in Haiti or working to build their first on the African continent, likely in Rwanda or the DRC.

“Rwanda makes sense,” Shuri is saying, talking quickly with her hands. “They are already rebuilding and developing. Their government is both interested and stable. They _have_ a government —”

“Exactly!” says Nakia. “Do you think people living in perpetual war zones don’t need hope or imagination? I’ve worked three missions in DRC; I’ve lived among them. Their own country has failed them, they _need_ us —”

“And how many more peacekeepers would we need to defend the center?” Shuri demands. “How many additional centers could we build for the security we’d require for just one?”

“Send the Jabari,” M’Baku interrupts. He leans across Bucky to retrieve a fried plantain. “We will keep your center safe.”

“Shut up,” say Shuri and Nakia at once, and he subsides easily, still grinning. Shuri goes on, “Rwanda has _asked_ for a center. What kind of face do we present to the world if we pass over giving aid where it is wanted?”

“And what does it say if we ignore the people who have no power to ask?” Nakia shoots back.

“Nakia.” Ramonda’s voice is soothing as she returns to the table, laying a hand on each woman’s shoulder. “I do not disagree with either of you. Remember: you will do great good in the world, both of you. But you will break under the burden if you insist to yourselves that you must save everyone. Be kind to the women I love, too.” And she leans over to kiss them each on the brow.

Shuri sighs unhappily, settling back in her chair. M’Baku says, “Especially if you gave Jabari access to the heart-shaped herb —”

“Oh, _shut_ up,” snaps Shuri, and throws her napkin down and storms out the door.

An uncomfortable silence falls over their end of the table. To the right of Shuri’s vacant seat, T’Challa is still deep in conversation with the head of the River Tribe; the Jabari guard are talking loudly at the next table. M’Baku raises his eyebrows, levels his gaze at Bucky, and says, “Well? Go talk to her.”

_Why me_ seems like too obvious a question. Bucky shrugs, sets down his fork, and goes.

He finds Shuri on a balcony two hallways from the dining room, hugging herself in a corner, half-hidden by hanging vines. There are tears on her face. She jerks away when he opens the door, dabbing quickly at her eyes, but he doesn’t say anything, just lets the door close behind him and goes to lean on the railing.

Shuri makes an angry little huff, and keeps crying. Bucky lets the evening air flow over him, gazing out over the city. Its buildings turn a dusty orange at sunset, like an ancient ruin almost, a golden city of legend. Somewhere distant, a bulbul is singing, _Pycnonotus barbatus._

“There was a little boy,” says Shuri, “in Oakland.”

Bucky drops his head and closes his eyes to listen.

“He loves working in the shop. He makes little animals out of the scrap — not vibranium, simple materials — and brings them home to his sister. His mother hits him.” She lets out a little sob. “And I thought — I thought I should go to the authorities. That we should report her, and get him and his sister to safety, and — Loretta said no.”

Loretta, Bucky knows, is the American-based head of Shuri’s program at the Oakland center. She’s black, and brilliant; she left a position with the UC Berkeley engineering department to join. Bucky asks, though he thinks he knows, “Why?”

“She says the foster care system is likely worse. She says that the stability of a familiar, two-parent home is probably better for a child. The lesser of two evils. I said I would take care of them myself, I’d bring them to _Wakanda,_ where they’d live — but — she said tearing a child from the parents he loves would still be traumatic even if —”

She cuts herself off, angry tears on her face. “I don’t even _want_ to save the whole world,” she says, in a small voice. “I mean, I do, but not like Nakia. I guess I don’t think about it like she does. But how can I — how can I have this much power, and privilege, and not be able to save one little boy?”

Bucky considers. Shuri sniffles quietly, and casts him a furtive, hopeful glance.

If she thinks he’ll somehow have a perfect answer, he’ll have to disappoint her.

“The way I see it,” he says, slowly, “is — two ways. One is, you can’t save anyone. We’re all fucked sooner or later, to varying degrees.”

Shuri makes an incredulous sound halfway between a snort and a sniffle. “Well, thanks,” she says, with a brave attempt to roll her eyes.

“The other,” says Bucky, “is maybe you already did.”

Shuri goes still. She doesn’t look at him, exactly, but her eyes slide over in his direction.

“Maybe his mom makes him feel like he’s worth nothing,” Bucky tries to explain. “But you come along, and you like his little animals, and you think he’s smart, and you tell him he means something. You tell him his mom’s wrong. And he’ll carry that for the rest of his life.”

It takes a long time for Shuri to answer. But Bucky has experience with being easily spooked; he stays where he is.

Finally, she comes over to him, moving clumsily, hesitates for a moment and sinks down to sit on the floor. She rests her back against the railing and her eyes somewhere beyond the marble facing on the palace’s exterior wall and says, “I never needed that,” like she’s ashamed of her family’s love.

Bucky sinks down to sit beside her, his flesh shoulder brushing against hers. “I did,” he says honestly. “I do.”

“Did anyone ever save you?”

He can’t help laughing. He tips his head back to consider the sky, a pale sunset blue streaked with wisps of cloud. “Shuri,” he says, “I’m a hundred years old. The list of people who’ve saved me would fill a book.”

It has, he realizes as he says it. Several of them — books of birds and books of people, books of newspaper articles, books of Steve. He has his notebooks and Steve has his sketchbooks and both of them are lodestones, north stars, the maps by which they find their way.

“You’re on it,” he tells her. “And T’Challa, and M’Baku. The kids — Kioko, Mandere, Feye. Okoye. Barasa. Natasha. Sam.”

Shuri settles closer, turns her face into his shoulder. “Steve?”

He laughs at that. It goes without saying. “Steve. Every day of my goddamn life, Steve.”

“I thought he used to be little and sick,” says Shuri, “and you were always saving him.”

Steve must have told her that; he hasn’t. He pokes her side. “Yeah, well. It goes both ways.” Suddenly remembering, he asks, “What’s going on with M’Baku?”

“Oh, Bast.” Shuri struggles to sit upright, rolling her eyes. “He thinks he’s being funny. Well — he’s also trying to get information. He asked for the heart-shaped herb, during negotiations today. He said we offered it to him once, in exchange for his help defeating my cousin, and the offer should stand.”

“That true?” Bucky asks.

Shuri gives a frustrated sigh. “Yes, but instead of accepting it, he showed us that T’Challa still lived, and allowed us to use the herb to restore his strength. That was all we had; N’Jadaka burned the rest. Even if we opened the powers of the Black Panther to more than one person —” She shakes her head. “The shamans think it will regenerate, but slowly. If it _doesn’t,_ it calls into question everything about our traditions, how we pass down power. That’s what M’Baku is trying to get us to admit — that right now, Wakanda has no heart-shaped herb.”

He didn’t know that. He didn’t know _any_ of that; Wakanda, it seems, still keeps some secrets to herself.

“Shuri,” says Bucky, slowly. “I think there’s something you need to see.”

\---

The stars are coming out around them, Venus low in the western sky, as they ride up to Mt. Bashenga. They move quickly down the darkened stairwell, knowing the way by feel, and Bucky flicks on the lights only once they’ve entered the lab where he works. He leads Shuri to the corner of two workbenches where he’s amassed his growing collection of tools and scrap materials, and reaches under it for the box.

He sets it on the benchtop to open it. Shuri leans close.

There are three jars inside. He’s been keeping them in the dark because that’s what it’s like in the mountainside cave where the true heart-shaped herb grows; because the herbs he first replanted in the river sand had leaves that looked different from their neighbors, more like those in the drawings from the monograph, but failed to produce any flowers. Shuri’s grandmother hypothesized that they might get their energy not from sunlight but rather from the radiation of the vibranium in the mountain itself.

A part of him, too, kept them hidden because he wasn’t entirely sure he should be doing this at all. Because Wakanda has opened so many of her secrets to him, but this one felt different, all along.

The plant in the jar of plain river sand looks much like the wild-growing herbs he collected it from, pale and leggy, with broad oval leaves. The jar of pure vibranium sand has grown nothing at all — a gamble, he knew when he planted it, given the lack of other nutrients, but it seemed worth a try.

The middle jar is of vibranium-enriched river sand. The plant growing there has darker green leaves, lobed like they dream of being stars. He beckons Shuri closer with a jerk of his chin, and draws the basal leaf back.

Underneath it, just beginning to unfurl, is a tiny purple bud, the barest trace of light glimmering in its veins.

“Bucky,” Shuri breathes.

Then: “how did you,” and “I can’t believe an _outsider,_ ” and, “for Bast’s sake, you better not have told anyone you did this, the elders will lose their _shit,_ ” and “ _Bucky,_ ” and then she’s throwing her arms around him and shrieking her delight, kissing his cheek, making a brief and terrifying effort to pick him up by the waist, which succeeds in lifting his feet a scant fraction of an inch off the floor before she drops him again with a great _oof._

“Your grandmother figured it out,” says Bucky, catching his breath, rifling for the monograph in his pile of papers. “I just read about it. And went running a lot. I haven’t told anyone,” he adds, to the anxiety lurking in the corners of her eyes. “You should say it was you.”

“I’ll say I asked you to do it,” says Shuri. “ _Bucky._ If this works —” She catches her breath. “Can we test it? Can we plant them in the gardens of Bast?”

That’s entirely up to her. Bucky tells her so. And so she leads the way, down staircases he’s never followed and through rough rock-hewn passages and farther down still, past the train tracks and the vibranium mountains within the mountain and deeper into a warren of tunnels, turn after narrow turn, until at last they emerge into a broader passageway, with a pavestone floor and water flowing through a channel at its center.

“This is the source,” Shuri murmurs. “One of them. For the river that runs through the city.” She leads him onward, kimoyo bead emitting a soft white light to illuminate their way.

She switches it off when they see the first torch. She says, in a voice that sounds almost nervous, “This is Bast’s temple,” and then, “Abuya? Are you here?”

The cave widens around them, torches on every wall, and the water spills into broad, still pools. Statues of snarling panthers rear out of them, and flames dance on their surface. The reflection of the high ceilings gives them the illusion of depth.

At the center of the room is a broad, shallow pit, filled with red garnet sand. All around it are the garden beds — or they should be. Only a few struggling hints of greenery protrude from the blackened earth.

“Shuri?” A woman in deep violet-blue robes hurries to meet them, but stops dead in her tracks at the sight of Bucky. “What — what is _he_ doing here?”

“He found a way to restore the herb,” says Shuri, in low, excited tones. “Bucky — show her.”

He can’t open the box while holding it, with only one arm. He sets it down on the stones and raises the lid.

For a moment, Abuya only stares. Then she lets out a strangled yelp of joy, and seizes Shuri by the shoulders. “You _did_ it,” she gasps, “my sweet child, you figured it out —”

“My grandmother figured it out,” Shuri corrects her gently, laying her hand over Abuya’s. “The White Wolf found her lost knowledge.”

Abuya transfers her gaze to Bucky as if she’s worried he might steal it. “Thank you,” she says stiffly, then bows her head and reaches to take his hand.

They stand there like for a moment, the three of them, a strange tableau. The reflected torchlight wavers like water across their faces. Then Shuri says, “So are we going to _plant_ them?” and Abuya lets out a choking laugh and says, “Yes. Yes, darling, of course.”

\---

“I tried it once,” says Shuri, later, on the walk home.

The jungle is pitch-black, except for the vibranium ore waymarkers that gleam a gentle blue. There are monkeys calling from the void of darkness outside them, and insects and frogs. This is the traditional way from the city to the cave — the old-fashioned way. _He walks the funeral paths,_ Bucky thinks, and his skin prickles. His feet find the roots that might catch his step by instinct, pad over them lightly, like he already knows his way.

“They didn’t believe they could ever have another baby.” Shuri skims her fingers over the leaves as she walks, step swaying side to side. “I am thirteen years younger than T’Challa. A blessing my father never expected. As far back as I remember, he spoke always of passing the mantle of Black Panther on to my brother as soon as he was ready — of making the time to be there for my childhood.”

“You were close to him.”

“Yes.” He can hear the smile in her voice, though he can’t see it in the gloom, but there’s a tinge of melancholy to it, too. “And I was _so jealous_ — I wanted to be big and strong, like my brother, and travel the world and fight bad guys and — I didn’t want T’Challa to be the Black Panther, _I_ wanted to be the Black Panther.”

Bucky thinks he can see where this is going. He smiles. “How old were you?”

“Eight,” she admits. “I snuck into the cave and stole an herb. T’Challa found me on the ceiling.”

Bucky can’t help it; he bursts out laughing.

“I was climbing walls!” says Shuri. “Literally! Like the worst kind of sugar high.” She twists around to grin at him mid-stride.

“What happened then?” Bucky asks.

“Nothing much. He took me back to the garden, and Abuya brewed the potion to strip the powers away again. It was — horrible,” she says, more quietly, “feeling that stripped away. Like nine days in bed with a fever, all in the space of nine heartbeats. I think T’Challa was going to scold me, but saw how miserable I was and didn’t. He never told anyone, either.”

They walk for a while in silence. The air is heavy with aromas, rotting wood and rich flowers and overripe fruit. The trees rustle, sometimes, from unknown sources. There’s the quiet scuffing of dry leaves, small formless creatures at work in the night.

“I sometimes think,” says Shuri, “if I hadn’t been born — if he’d stayed Black Panther, then the bomb might not have killed him. If he’d had the strength to survive the initial blast —”

She stops, suddenly, wheels, because Bucky’s gripping her hard by the upper arm, spinning her to face him. Her breath startles, catches. Her eyes flick up to his face.

“Shuri,” he says, and he finds its hard to govern the raw feeling in his voice; “You can’t think like that. You can’t — _ever_ —”

He’s gripping her too hard. Those are tears of pain in her eyes; he releases her abruptly, steps back, horrified. “I’m sorry.”

Shuri’s hand comes up to rub her arm, where his fingers pressed into it. She’s still staring at him. In this spirit-light, her only color is blue, gleaming on the dark curve of her cheeks. His only color is blue, too, but on him it must be ghastly, pale face, deep hollows of his cheeks.

He doesn’t deserve her forgiveness. He still hurts the people around him, no matter how hard he tries.

She doesn’t forgive him, though. She just says, “Thank you,” and turns to set her feet once more upon the path.


	7. Chapter 7

Bucky goes to the talks the next day, at Shuri’s request. 

She dresses him in Wakandan garb, rich and resplendent, and fusses over his hair. She adorns her own face with spots of color, coils her braids on her head, then studies both of them in the mirror, sighs, “Good enough,” and leads the way down to the throne room.

Abuya meets them in the entryway. She looks nervous, wringing her hands, but she falls in step at Shuri’s right shoulder, Bucky at her left. The rich folds of fabric almost conceal his lopsided shoulders, his missing arm.

The elders are already seated when they enter. A pair of Dora Milaje swing the heavy doors closed behind them, then stand to attention, crossing their arms at their chests. Shuri and Abuya mimic the gesture. Bucky can’t, but he puts his hand to his shoulder in a gesture he hopes communicates respect.

On his throne, T’Challa’s face is impassive. M’Baku and his warriors are arrayed along one side of the room, the remaining tribes’ elders on the other. As at dinner, Nakia and Ramonda are at T’Challa’s left elbow. At his right, Okoye hovers just far enough back for a comprehensive view of the room.

“Elders,” says Shuri, inclining her head. Out of the corner of his eye, Bucky can see her throat bob nervously. “M’Baku; respected Jabari. Before today’s negotiations continue, I would like to address the matter that arose in our meetings yesterday.”

It’s strange seeing them this solemn, this tense. Last night, they were all laughing over their drinks together; Bucky knows the royal family regard M’Baku as a friend. He thinks of Steve and Tony, of their falling-out over the Sokovia Accords, even before his own past drove them utterly apart; he thinks of Peggy, bullying Colonel Phillips and MI6 alike.

“Speak, sister,” says T’Challa.

Shuri looks directly at M’Baku, whose expression displays open surprise. “Honored M’Baku,” she says. “You asked us yesterday of our attempts to regenerate the gardens of the heart-shaped herb. As all of you know, they were burned last year by our cousin N’Jadaka, before he fell.”

There’s a murmur of movement around the room; the elders shift in their seats. _It’s deliberate,_ Bucky thinks. _She’s reminding them of their past errors in judgment, of their share of the blame._

“Yesterday we told you the truth,” says Shuri. “Our greatest shamans are working to regenerate the Gardens of Bast. What I did not tell you is that my own grandmother, honored Dhakiya, had developed a theory on the origin of the herb, and that I had assigned the White Wolf to test if it was true.”

The murmuring is louder this time. Shuri speaks over it. “He has traveled far and wide across our country in search of the herb,” she says, pitching her voice steadily louder as the susurrus grows. “And we are here today to announce his success. A single, mature heart-shaped herb was transplanted into the Gardens of Bast yesterday evening. And this morning —” she looks to Abuya — “it bloomed.”

Abuya presses a kimoyo bead at her wrist. In the air before her, the image shimmers into being: a wide, purple flower, petals curled like a heart. In its throat glows a soft purple light.

The elders are gasping. Ramonda’s hand is on her heart; Nakia is smiling like a breaking dawn. Even Okoye looks astonished. T’Challa only smiles, meeting his sister’s eyes.

Bucky thinks, _What in the hell have I gotten myself into._

Abuya says, “It is so.”

At her words, T’Challa rises, raising his hand for silence. The image of the blossom fades away. He says, “My friends. Now that the matter of the succession of the Black Panther is resolved —”

“It’s not _resolved,_ ” says the woman at M’Baku’s left. “You haven’t said who will inherit —”

“The next Black Panther will be chosen as the next Black Panther is always chosen,” says T’Challa calmly. “By he who holds the mantle now — and he bears no obligation to share his choice with any but the caretakers of the Garden of Bast.” He inclines his head deeply to Abuya, then straightens. “If that will be all?”

He sits. But the muttering has started again, and then the elder of the River Tribe rises abruptly to his feet, a dramatic finger outstretched toward Bucky. “It violates the sacred trust, to allow an outsider to tinker with the secrets of Bast!”

The room erupts into chaos.

There are voices on all sides of him, fingers pointing, people out of their seats. He hears Nakia saying, “helped _save_ it,” and someone else, “a colonizer,” and another voice, “polluted too much already,” and, “that girl,” and, “on top of giving _vibranium_ to white men, now,” and Shuri is giving him a wry look, like she knew this was going to happen all along, but Abuya looks worried, and —

— and M’Baku rises, towering over the rest of the room, and thumps his club once on the floor. “He is not an outsider,” he says. “He is the White Wolf.”

“He is not Wakandan,” says the elder of the Mining Tribe, rising to her feet. “He is not one of us!”

M’Baku smiles slightly. “Neither is the White Wolf.”

A tumult of voices rises again. Bucky has no idea what they’re talking about; he remembers M’Baku’s retelling of the tale vaguely, from halfway into a drunken stupor, but this —

“White Wolf is a fairytale,” someone is saying. “It was never meant to be a man —”

“White Wolf is sacrilegious to the great goddess Bast!” someone else declares.

Then T’Challa says, in ringing tones, “Enough.”

He hasn’t risen from his throne. His eyes, though, are flint; his word halts the hubbub in its tracks. Heads turn to stare at him, but he doesn’t speak. Slowly, the gathered council take their seats, M’Baku last of all.

Still, T’Challa waits a long moment before speaking. The stillness settles over them like a living thing. Like a power of its own, ancient and immovable, asserting itself at last.

“My father,” T’Challa says, “told me the story of the White Wolf.”

All around the room, heads bow in reverence. Shuri closes her eyes, swiftly, and opens them again.

“The White Wolf is said to have existed before any of our gods,” says T’Challa, “and will remain after all of them. You are right; he is no god himself. And you are wrong, in a way, M’Baku; he is an outsider. He is _the_ outsider.”

Bucky swallows. But T’Challa smiles at him. “Do not worry, Sergeant Barnes,” he says. “It is not a prophecy. It is only a name.”

The throne room is silent. T’Challa looks around it, slowly; he meets every last eye. Then he says, “As my _Baba_ told it — the White Wolf was a parable. A reminder not to fear what we do not understand. But it seems to me you are asking a larger question, Oluoch. What does this new policy of openness mean for our most deeply held traditions? Do we throw open Wakanda to outsiders without reservation? Do we hold back anything sacred, for only ourselves?”

There’s a murmur of agreement around the room.

T’Challa says, “I answer you — yes. If anything, our identity as Wakandans is more sacred than ever before. Our country is a shining beacon to all the nations on earth; they look to our example. _Yes,_ we must continue to revere the things that make us who we are.”

He meets Bucky’s eyes. “But we may find that outsiders, too, care for our traditions. That outsiders will help us, as we help them; that they will love Wakanda as we do, serve her as we do.” He bows his head. “Sergeant Barnes has done Wakanda a great service. I thank him, and am honored that he calls our country home.”

Bucky feels wooden with embarrassment. All he did was mess around with some dirt. And yeah, he — likes it here, yeah it’s the first place he’s known since 1942 that feels like his own —

The elder of the Mining Tribe is looking at him. Her eyes are deep, compassionate, shrewd; she seems to be weighing him in her gaze. She says, “Then let him become Wakandan.”

There’s no outbreak of whispers this time. Just a turning of startled faces, and she says, “He knows our deepest secrets; he is exiled from his own nation and calls our country home. It has been done before. Not for hundreds of years, but it has been done. Let him become Wakandan.”

“Sergeant Barnes,” says T’Challa. “What say you?”

Bucky swallows. _Let’s hear it for Captain America!_ he hears in his own voice, ringing down the years, and yeah, he supposes this is what he deserves.

His voice, when he finds it, feels rusted. “I, uh. I’m guessing you all know where I’ve been.”

There’s a general ripple through the faces around him that might be described as a nod. A sea of eyes; Bucky’s throat feels paper-dry. He says, “I joined the US Army in 1942. To — help keep the world from falling apart at the seams.”

It’s hard to remember what that was like, now; what the nation was like. Still wrestling its way free of depression, a wild counterpoint of bracing optimism and despair. The world was ending, then, and yet everyone he knew seemed to believe that somehow all it would take was a good crew of Brooklyn boys to send the Japs and Krauts packing. That they would march clean-cut and wholesome right through the trenches of Europe, clock Hitler in the face, dust off their hands and go home.

What utter, utter bullshit.

“That’s a lie,” he says suddenly. “America didn’t care about the world; it cared about revenge on the Japanese. I didn’t care, either, not really, but my friend Steve did. You might know that story.” A couple people laugh. “He actually _did_ save the world, and sacrificed himself to do it. I, uh — I wasn’t anything like that noble. I spent the next seventy years being one of the people who tear the world apart.”

It’s important that he explain this right, suddenly. He can’t remember the last time he talked this much in one go. He says, “The people in charge of me, then — they were from all different countries. Russia, Germany, America. They worked in governments; they said they wanted to save the world, but really they only wanted to tear it apart.”

He worked for fucking everyone, in those days. He remembers Steve telling him how broken up Natasha was about it, when they realized SHIELD had been Hydra all along; that defecting to the good guys wasn’t defecting to the good guys at all.

He wouldn’t know how to be broken up about that. He wouldn’t know how to construct a version of himself that knows he’s a good guy — that’s _sure._

“I don’t know,” he says slowly, “that I’ve got much faith in governments. Governments don’t have much faith in me, either — at this point, you’re pretty much the only one that would have me. But.”

This is the crux of it, really, and it’s suddenly too hard to put into words. He wants to say something about outreach centers, and little kids and their puppies, and the living wood of Jabariland; he wants to say something about the beads on the Dora Milaje’s armor and the disk in Oluoch’s lip. About the land and the things that spring out of it, the glimmering veins that run through its core. He wants, suddenly, to hand them his notebooks, bright with Steve’s drawings, and say, _Here. I studied. I lived here. Here. Take me as I am._

“I guess I got faith in some other things,” he says instead, and his voice cracks. “In — people. I didn’t know I could do that. I didn’t know a _country_ could do that, but — you do.” He closes his eyes to manage the last few words. “I guess what I’m saying is — every country that’s ever had a piece of me has used me to tear things down. I think I’d like being part of one that wants to build them up.”

It’s a stupid choice, probably. Governments make bad decisions; governments _always_ make bad decisions. He’ll only get pulled into it.

But this government is run by T’Challa, who set down revenge for compassion, who traded in his anger for justice. And by Shuri, who cried for a little kid in Oakland.

He opens his eyes. The room is still silent, still staring. Then M’Baku rises; again, it’s M’Baku to rise.

He sucks in a great breath. Then he barks it back out again, body jerking with the work of his diaphragm: “ _Huh!_ ”

The elder of the Mining Tribe is next to rise. She grunts, “ _huh,_ ” and M’Baku joins her; then Shuri is joining them, on Bucky’s right, and Abuya beyond her; then the queen, and one by one, the whole room is on its feet. Their joint chorus rolls through the stones, through the very soles of his feet, trembles up his limbs. Even Okoye is grunting, swaying slightly where she stands, and the air is throbbing with it. It feels animal, primal; possessive in a fierce, instinctive way. It feels like Steve covering Bucky’s body with his own, saying with every muscle, _homecoming. Home._

It falls silent by some invisible signal. Shuri is beaming.

“James Buchanan Barnes of the Golden Tribe,” says T’Challa, formally. “The White Wolf of Wakanda. Welcome home.”

Bucky looks around. He can’t find the earlier suspicion on any of their faces, now. That doesn’t mean it’s gone, entirely, but it’s — something. He’s — something. And they’re his, now.

“Bucky. Call me Bucky,” he says.

\---

“So technically,” says Shuri, “Bucky is my brother now.”

“ _Technically,_ ” T’Challa interjects, “I sponsored him, which makes him your nephew. But since he is a hundred years older than you, we’ll let it slide.”

“Eighty-two years,” objects Shuri.

T’Challa says, “My point stands.”

“How about you, Captain Rogers?” Shuri asks brightly. “How do you count your age?”

They’re in the lab. Shuri is on the left side of the table, Steve on the right, and T’Challa at the foot, all of which is easier to think about than where _Bucky_ is, because he’s flat on his back and staring up at the ceiling, fighting not to tremble, fighting not to think about the thin beams of light currently in the process of rewiring the synapses in his metal shoulder. Shuri bends low to see what she’s doing, her chatter aimless and glittering; Steve clutches Bucky’s hand tight.

“If you don’t count the ice years,” he says, “I’m thirty-two. But ninety-nine is more fun to say at parties.”

Bucky doesn’t have any number so clear-cut. He remembers his missions, yes — _he remembers all of them —_ but the between-times are harder to pin down. Training, fighting, visits to the Red Room; his chair, his chair, his chair. They kept him there for days sometimes, he thinks, like a toy you power down and set on the shelf. The deadliest weapon in their arsenal. For special occasions.

Steve’s is a good hand to grip. He doesn’t mind when Bucky squeezes harder than a mortal man should.

T’Challa probably wouldn’t either. White men have spent a century chasing down the damn supersoldier serum. Killing each other to get it, hurling themselves into medical experiments. Hurling others. Here in Wakanda, it grows in the damn sand.

The day after Bucky’s initiation, T’Challa had taken him to sit in his office, just the two of them. He’d folded his hands in his lap and said, “We have a decoction, here, that saps away the power of the heart-shaped herb. Only our shamans know its secrets.”

Bucky had looked up sharply. He was feeling uncomfortable in himself, as strange almost as back in Italy, walking around too small for his own body. Like everything that was Bucky Barnes could barely be pinned to convincingly cover his bones. He hadn’t been sure, then, if it was the things they’d done to him in there, cleansing his body of its aches and scars, making it a thing without memory, too-fast too-strong — or just that he was thrown by the enormity of Steve, the literal and metaphysical enormity of Steve.

“I do not know if it would work on you,” T’Challa had said. “I do not know the side effects if it did. But if you wish to attempt it, I will not stand in your way.”

Bucky had considered his hand, the lines of it. His first thought wasn’t, _What will it do to me?_ It was, _Would Steve do it? Would he be sick again if he did?_

“Do you want to get rid of it?” he’d asked.

T’Challa had closed his eyes, and taken a moment to answer. “I’m very grateful to be able to defend my people,” he’d said finally, “but I — I may have children of my own, someday — my father was a very happy man.” He’d opened his eyes again, looked at Bucky. “Yes,” he’d said, and there was a scraped-raw honesty in him Bucky didn’t think he’d ever seen.

A family. Steve and Peg never got to raise those terrifying, imaginary youngsters. But there were quite enough people to be looking after already; they hadn’t had kids, true, but the rest of the world had, and now —

He doesn’t want to be a thing without a memory again. He wants his scars, and his strength.

He’d said no, then. He opens his eyes now and finds Steve’s face; there’s a tickling in his shoulder, a phantom limb fluttering in and out of being. Steve’s face, though, that’s okay. That’s more than okay. He grew a goddamn beard.

“You should say thirty-two,” Bucky tells him. “I want everyone to think I’m a cradlerobber.”

Steve just smiles at him. Sappiest fucking eyes this side of the East River, Bucky’s always been helpless against them.

They are still this side of the East River, he supposes. Plus a few thousand miles and some pocket change in years.

You could drown in Steve’s eyes. Stare and stare ‘til you just fucking drown, with one of Steve’s hands in your hand and the other gripping your forearm, palm warm and callused and catching all the ragged heartbeats that pump the blood down your veins. He never had this before, not once, even when they assigned blonde young men to run him and insist they were his friends; even when they tried to smother him in kindness, in honeyed words, it wasn’t like this.

And he’s suddenly that kid again, seventeen, two arms, because he’s saying, “Steve,” and, “the shit they did to me, Steve,” ‘cause it _wasn’t_ just what he did, they _did things to him,_ too, and they did things to Steve, and he’s mourned sometimes for those boyhood selves they lost, but never really for the ones that survived — the boys with guns in their hands and death in their dreams and so many needles in their skin.

“I know, Buck,” Steve’s saying, “I know,” and keeps holding him there, the point of light in his tunnel as the past roars like a freight train in his ears; keeps holding him like he’s always been holding him and always will be, since before they even knew each other and until there’s nothing left of the world but dust. And then sometime it’s over, and they’re alone in the room, and he’s only got one arm again, just the one, and Steve’s got him pulled up against his chest with his hand in Bucky’s hair and both of them are crying like the rain.


	8. Chapter 8

Bucky hikes up into the hills, one afternoon when the December rain lets up, and chops down a juniper tree for Christmas. 

There’s no spruce or fir or pine here, which makes this the closest he can find. He forgets to bring a strap for carrying the ax, so dragging it back home is awkward, ax handle and tree trunk both circled in his single fist, but he manages. He and Shuri are putting the final touches on the prototype arm. It should be ready next week.

The kids help him decorate the tree. They’re skeptical, at first, but soon they’re running around retrieving treasures to nestle in its branches, found feathers and broken butterfly wings and scraps of cloth and ribbon, until the whole thing is a curiosity cabinet, an aesthetic-agnostic explosion of color outside Bucky’s door. Mandere places its crowning jewel — a metal frog, red-lacquered, a gift from Shuri’s little boy in Oakland — and Bucky helps lift her to reach the top of the tree.

It sits there outside his window, after that, and it gets soggy sometimes in the rain, but it’s still bright, and looking at it makes him smile.

When Steve walks out of the quinjet that Thursday, of course, he’s got a whole goddamn fir tree under his arm.

Bucky doubles over laughing. “Where’d you get that from, Siberia?” he asks, and then, “No wait, don’t tell me you dropped right through the defense systems of the most militarized nation on earth to pick one up at Flaherty’s on Flatbush —”

“Ukraine,” says Steve, smiling, and Bucky says, “Steve, you idiot, I’ve already got one.”

They put it up in Bucky’s rooms at the city, instead, so he’s got two trees: one a distorted candleflame of a juniper and the other a perfect cone smelling of northern forests and snow and the past, because this is Steve fucking Rogers here, he doesn’t do this shit halfway. He even pulls out a box, once they’ve got it stable and vertical, and hands it over to Bucky. It’s Christmas tree ornaments, blown-glass balls like the ones Bucky’s mom used to hang high on the tree, out of the kids’ reach; the ones she threw away when the war started, because they came from Germany. They look good against the dark needles of the fir, shining red and gold and purple and silver, like flowers in the sun.

Back home, Steve studies Bucky’s juniper and allows that he’s done well but somehow gets the whole neighborhood enlisted in a popcorn garland operation just the same. They pop the kernels on Bucky’s stove and string them together with needle and thread, just like they did with Bucky’s sisters, back when they were kids. Bucky remembers stabbing his fingers with a needle and yelling at Rebecca to stop eating the popcorn and not minding any of it because Steve wasn’t coughing and his tiny face looked happy and intent. Now is pretty much the same, except that Steve’s face is a lot bigger and Bucky’s stabbing his knee, not his fingers — hard to wield needles one-handed — and the kids stealing the popcorn are Kioko and Mandere and Feye.

They spend Christmas morning eating pancakes, because that’s what you do on Christmas morning, and get all the skeptical kids to try them, too. Then they head up to Jabariland, because that’s tradition now, too, and Bucky consents to wrestle M’Baku, and puts him in the water, and wakes the next day hungover but languidly happy.

“How long are you here for?” he asks Steve, on the trail back down to the quinjet, shaking snow from Shuri’s latest ambush out of his cloak.

“I’m not sure yet,” says Steve. “Things have quieted down; Sam and Nat are doing good. I thought I might — stay for a while.”

“Yeah?” says Bucky, and Steve grins and says, “Yeah,” and puts his arm around Bucky’s hips.

They go home that night and sleep intertwined, the breeze flowing through the curtains. It carries the cool kiss of rain-smells, and thunder sounds in the distance, and the sparrows are back; they’ve set up a nest in the Christmas tree, a little farther from the window than last year, but Bucky can still hear them murmuring to each other when the thunder crashes loud.

_I got him, Peg,_ he thinks, laying his hand on Steve’s broad back. _It took me a little while but I got him. I’ll keep him safe for you._

And he remembers her saying to him, tart and British and hiding her fire as crisp syllables in plain sight, _It will take both of us to keep that colossal idiot alive. Are you with me?_ , and Bucky nodding yes.

In the morning, they walk into the city, and Shuri attaches Bucky’s almost-final arm.

He doesn’t remember this part, from before. He remembers waking up with pain and rage twin fires in his veins; he remembers seeing a doctor’s face and wanting to hurt, to choke, to kill. He doesn’t remember wanting blood, but he remembers wanting _quiet,_ wanting the air to stop moving in and out of all the noisy warm meddling bodies around him, wanting their corpses still on the floor like stones.

Shuri puts on the arm with all his sensory inputs dialed down to zero, just a dead lump on his unfeeling shoulder, and then she steps back and says, “It’s up to you.”

Bucky swallows. He thinks his code word, _thinks_ it, and looks at Steve and loves him and reaches into the control panel to turn the first neurological feedback on.

Awareness of his arm blossoms into form. His body feels unbalanced, suddenly; there’s just as much arm on his left side as on his right, and he has _fingers,_ there are fingers on him, so he switches on the muscular output and flexes them, watches them move.

Shuri’s practically bursting out of her skin to tell him to turn his other sensory inputs on, so he does, and suddenly —

— he can feel the air move over his skin. He has _skin,_ or he feels like it, anyway; skin that senses the warmth of the lamp and the soft fabric of his shirt and the cool stone of the wall when he reaches out abruptly, instinctively, to steady himself.

His arm moves like a dream. He can feel how hard he could swing it, if he wanted, but it’s lighter than the last one, easier to bear. He raises the hand to his hair — he could tie it back himself, now, he has two hands to draw it together, to smooth down the stray strands — and he _feels_ it, light and silken between his fingers, trailing over his metal skin.

Steve’s looking at him with the love just fucking bursting out of him, and Bucky doesn’t think about it, just reaches for him — he never touched anyone like this, with the old arm, not ever — and the hair of Steve’s beard is rough under his fingertips but soft, too. He can feel the hard line of his jaw, squarer than it used to be, can feel the muscles in his cheek flex when he smiles, and then he turns his face to press a kiss into Bucky’s metal palm, and it shoots through his body like an electric charge, which Bucky supposes it is, but — _shit_. He catches his breath, swaying on his feet.

Shuri coughs discreetly, and Bucky startles to remember she’s there. “Take it for a test drive,” she says, smiling, “just don’t get it wet — it’s not sealed yet,” and he nods, faintly, and she vanishes out the door.

Steve’s staring at him like he’s as transfixed as Bucky is. Bucky pivots his wrist — it goes silently, without catching — and the look in Steve’s eyes is permission, so he touches his thumb lightly to Steve’s lips.

They’re soft and full and warm; they give under a little pressure. He wants, abruptly and completely, to slip his finger into Steve’s mouth, to feel the wet silk heat of it — he remembers how Steve used to hollow his cheeks, when he —

“Buck,” says Steve, a little ragged, “she said not to get it wet,” and he lifts his hand to take Bucky’s arm by the wrist and draw it gently away.

On a real arm, he’d be wrapping his fingers around the place just below his wrist bones, where the veins are shallow and blue beneath the skin. On Bucky’s — they mapped the mechanoreceptors to reflect their real-life density, and he doesn’t have hair to stand up on end, but it would be, _fuck_. Steve’s thumb brushes again over the pulse point he doesn’t have, and he gasps, and then Steve twines their fingers together, and that’s a sensation he could analyze for hours, days — where is the electrical connection that converts that particular pattern of mechanical stimuli, warm palm, tender inside skin on the insides of their fingers, into a sense of home, belonging, _understood?_

He wants to touch Steve all over. He wants to learn how he feels, every last inch of him, with his old skin and his new.

“We should,” he says, and it feels as though he’s never used his lips before, even though they’re anything but new, “my rooms.”

Steve just nods. He looks as choked up on words as Bucky feels. He doesn’t let go of his hand, not until they’re riding down from the mountain and Bucky frees it to play with the breeze, cupping and releasing it like he did from his dad’s car as a kid, marveling at the pressure on his palm. Steve’s laughing at him, but he doesn’t care, and then Steve’s curving a hand around his bicep — he has a bicep, the same shape as the real one — and kissing him, and Bucky runs his hand through Steve’s hair and can’t stop, loves the feel of it between his fingers, until they’re at the palace and it’s get themselves under control or risk embarrassment in front of all the Dora Milaje.

They stumble to his rooms in a daze. Up, up the stairs no one uses because they’re not supersoldiers and this place is enormously tall. Out into the hall, down to the burnt orange door and through.

Their Christmas tree is winking with light by the glass balcony doors, and for a moment, it seizes Bucky’s entire attention. He goes to it; he has to feel the prickly curve of its needles, the glass-smooth of the ornaments, measure their slight weight in his palm.

He opens the door to the balcony, because the wind up here is his favorite thing about these rooms, another sensation to be gathered. It snatches at his breath. He feels Steve’s fingers light and questioning on his elbow, and turns and shivers and puts his hand on Steve’s chest.

Steve’s _chest._ There’s something new, sculpted muscle, almost too perfect to be real, but it is, because that’s Steve’s heart thumping under it, at the dip where his sternum lies. Bucky remembers what it felt like here when Steve was small, how even his tiny chest seemed almost too wide for his fragile bones. How it collapsed in on itself, almost, especially when he was struggling to breathe. He remembers Steve’s bird-flutter of a heartbeat, and lying with his head tucked under Steve’s chin all casual, like he wasn’t taking the opportunity to monitor things, like those horrible pauses when Steve’s heart _should_ beat and _didn’t_ weren’t enough to make him hold his breath every time.

Steve’s heartbeat now is steady, solid, a metronome; you could set your clocks by Steve’s heartbeat, and Bucky thinks in a way he does. He misses it, though — abruptly, furiously, with the ache of a century of loss — he _misses_ that body, that fragile perfect thing in his hands, wishes he could touch it like this, feel it like this.

“Buck?” says Steve softly, covering Bucky’s metal hand with his own.

Bucky says, “I wish —”

But it’s useless, and also ridiculous. There are so many pasts he can wish could unfold for them, but they have this present, and it’s more than he ever could have hoped.

“Yeah,” says Steve, “me too.”

He probably doesn’t wish he were small and sick. Or maybe he does; there were times, in the war, when Bucky would catch him staring down at his own arms like he didn’t recognize them, or discover page after page of sketches — a hand, a shoulder, himself in the mirror, and more faintly, hazy with memory, himself before. Bucky stole one of those sketches, once, a goddamn pinup page, Steve with his shirt off and his dog tags on, all muscle definition and cross-hatched shadows, mouth slightly open and eyes glassy like he _knew_ it would drive Bucky wild, and — on the reverse, again. Steve in a mirror, planes of his chest flat, collarbones sloping down to his shoulders like sticks. But his face was serious, confident, and Bucky spent almost as much time looking at that one, alone in his tent; maybe more.

He wishes he hadn’t lost those drawings. Then again, he found Steve.

He skims his new fingers down Steve’s side, traces the trim lines of his waist. He thinks, maybe, this is how Steve sees people; how he draws the angles of them and the curves. Maybe his pencil learns their bodies this intimately, feels them this shockingly new.

“Can I touch you,” he says.

“God, Buck,” says Steve, and his voice comes out breathy; he could say _you already are_ or _don’t be an idiot_ but all he adds is, “ _yes._ ”

So Bucky does. The way they haven’t touched each other since 1944; the way they haven’t touched each other _ever,_ because his nerves have never been this alive with it, never felt the velvet of Steve’s skin or the curl of his hair quite like this. It’s never brought him to his knees before, when his knuckles brush Steve’s ribs as he pulls his shirt up over his head; he’s never felt Steve’s breath stutter like this, his metronome heart speed up like this, his thighs fall open like this, his pulse beat hard in his wrists. He’s never been distracted long minutes by feeling his way over each tiny bone in Steve’s knuckles before, each callus, each crease in his palm; he’s never set Steve begging quite like this, wrecked by his slow, exacting attention.

But Steve has leverage, too, and he uses it, running his hands over Bucky’s body, his new arm. Then, when Bucky’s too far down the bed and out of reach, exploring the downy hair on the insides of Steve’s thighs, Steve hooks a knee around his elbow, skin and metal pressed flush, searing with more than heat.

That’s how Bucky learns that using his arm’s power can feel good, too. Bearing down on the lever he’s been offered, pinning Steve’s legs open, pressing his face between his thighs and remembering the smell of him, doing things he hasn’t wanted to do in — God, ages —

— and he doesn’t know if this means something new. He doesn’t know if he’ll wake up tomorrow and want this just as badly as he wants it now; he doesn’t know if it’s cruel to Steve, to do this once, when he doesn’t _know_ — doesn’t know if he’s _like_ this anymore, if his body can ever belong to Steve in quite the way it did before —

— but it’s hard to get lost in his doubts just now, with Steve coming apart for him, flushed and warm and trembling and _breaking,_ the muscles of his thighs quivering where Bucky kneads them with his fingers, the temperature of him spiking beneath his rosy, perfect skin.

“Bucky,” he’s saying, “Bucky,” with his head tipped back and his throat seizing at every breath and his face shining with sweat, and then he’s pulling him up the bed and kissing him like mountains falling, like a storm, like a plane bombing out of the sky.

And he’s not done yet, because he’s guiding Bucky’s fingers where he wants them — flesh, not metal, they’re both being good — and canting his own hips until Bucky gets with the program, working the last of Bucky’s clothing free. Then Bucky’s naked, all his skin charged in the open air, and Steve’s whispering, _do you want,_ and when Bucky nods, beyond words, Steve guides him down, into him, the furnace of him, like it’s nothing, like it hasn’t been seventy-something fucking years.

And he’s maybe right, because even with Steve crushed tight in Bucky’s arms, this still feels old, not new. This still feels perfect, familiar, their bodies churning together like only they can, hard and reckless like everything was in the war; thoughtless, like everything was between them always, just the most natural, divine, heart-shattering, perfect thing in the world.

Afterward, when Bucky has come down from being a sunburst supernova and rediscovered himself in his skin, muscles aching and heart racing and incredulous laughter bubbling from his throat, Steve throws an arm over him and draws him close and doesn’t say anything at all. He looks like someone’s scooped out his brain and replaced it with pure debauched bliss, marks on his body from Bucky’s mouth, lips puffy from kissing. He rests a hand on Bucky’s heart, and Bucky slides in against his side, tucks his head under Steve’s chin like he used to do.

He lets his gaze travel over the room, half-lidded, floating somewhere within himself. It’s all decorated in orange and black and white, wall hangings and a lush rug, all things he can try touching, later. The air is sighing gently over his skin, stirring the branches of the Christmas tree, which honestly clashes horribly with the rest of the decor, but to hell with it. The colorful glass balls sparkle in the sunlight, seeming almost to dance —

No. They are dancing, or at least that one is, because it’s no Christmas tree ornament at all. It’s a sunbird, resplendent in yellow and green and purple, and it flares its wings and flits to the next ornament, and then the next, pecking each as if unconvinced by its claim not to be a flower. Another is alighting on the railing, then, and flitting inside, the end of a bough swaying slightly where it lands, needles wrapped tight in its tiny claws.

Bucky should get up, maybe. Shoo them out. Instead, he turns his face into Steve’s neck, says, “ _Cinnyris venustis_ ” into his sweat-salty skin, and stays exactly where he is.

\---

“Do I need to disinfect that?” asks Shuri, dubious, the next morning, when they arrive for breakfast rosy-skinned and utterly unsubtle. Steve blushes under his beard, but Bucky grins, unrepentant.

“Vibranium,” he says; “naturally antimicrobial,” and pops a slice of pineapple into his mouth.

“You’re unbelievable,” Shuri tells him, and goes to eat in the garden.

The plans for a Rwandan outreach center are going ahead. Nakia is already on the ground there, and Shuri and Okoye will join her later in January. Shuri wants to make the final modifications to Bucky’s arm, first. It feels like the end of something, a chapter; like the beginning of another.

When he surrenders the arm to her, Shuri accepts it without further mockery, debriefs him instead on the final specifications. He feels as lopsided without it as he did when he first put it on. He doesn’t have much he wants to change about it, a couple small things that will be easily tweaked, a certain angle that cuts off sensation from his tricep region. She takes the arm and promises to figure that out, then send the final plans in for production.

In the meantime, Bucky takes Steve home. There’s neatening up to do around his _banda,_ things he’s let slide in the chaos of the last few months. The stove needs cleaning, and the hay needs cutting, while it’s still green, to get them through until the next rains. The sparrows’ eggs have hatched, and their young pipe constantly, frenzied parents flitting to and fro with mouths full of caterpillars.

They spend another day in the city to test the _final_ final version of his arm, and pass it off as done. Then it’s off to be painted and waterproofed; it needs a week for the internal osmotic seal to cure.

Steve gets the call on a Wednesday. It’s to a phone he always carries, but Bucky’s never seen him use. Its ring is loud, old-fashioned, and it splits the quiet air like a jolt from another lifetime.

For a moment, Steve only stares at it. Then he flips it open, lifts it to his ear, and says, “Tony?” like he’s been expecting it all along.

\---

Bucky offers to go with them. His arm isn’t ready, though, and in the end Steve touches the corner of his mouth and says, “We’ll probably need you at full strength before this is out, Buck,” and, “next time I see you — I might be bringing a war.”

“I’m good at wars,” says Bucky, because it’s true, and Steve offers him a crooked smile and says, “ _The_ war, then,” and yeah, this isn’t the first time they’ve been faced with _the_ war, either of them.

“Guess they’ll need us,” says Bucky, and Steve laughs and nods and gets in the jet and flies away.

Bucky goes to the armory. He selects his choice of guns and knives; they feel familiar in his palm. He goes home. He rakes the hay, and stacks it. He tells Kioko what needs doing, if he has to go away for a while. He pets the puppies, hardly puppies anymore, and hopes someday he’ll have the chance to do that with his new hand.

He pages through his notebooks, spilling over now with jagged handwriting and colorful illustrations, like some ancient illuminated manuscript. He runs his fingers over the inlay of the coffee box. He stacks firewood, and makes the bed, in case it comes time to leave it in a hurry.

When T’Challa and the Dora Milaje crest the hill, he knows. They’re carrying a black-and-silver box, and he knows; their faces are grim, and he knows.

It’s the home he chose. It’s the safest place in the world, and the world knows that, now, and that was only ever going to mean one thing.

“Where’s the fight?” he asks, because all other questions are pointless, and he doesn’t blink when T’Challa meets his eyes and says, “On its way.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> All right, that's a wrap on this fic! Now I can tell you: I started the whole dang thing because my grandmother once had sunbirds on her Christmas tree in Kenya, and I felt that Bucky deserved the same.
> 
> Once again, all my thanks go out to Cass, who doesn't even go here and is still somehow the best feedback partner in the game; to Natalie, for the care and feeding of this particular MCU neophyte; and to Leo, for the birds.
> 
> (If you're curious about future plans: I have been poking at a Wakanda-centric post-Infinity War fic lately. I think I need to finish at least one of my Supernatural WIPs before I let it really have attention, but hey, watch this space maybe!)
> 
> ETA: I went and did the [tumblr thing](https://gravelghosts.tumblr.com/post/180247476869/mcu-fic-the-white-wolf-of-wakanda-stevebucky), if you want to reblog. Thanks for reading! <3


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